


Destiny Is The Rabbit Hole

by maggiemerc



Series: The Monomythical Adventures of Regina Mills and Emma Swan [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/F, Femslash, Quest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 96,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggiemerc/pseuds/maggiemerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry begging Regina to rescue Snow White and Emma from the Enchanted Forest in the season 2 premiere sets the formerly evil queen on a quest that takes her from the mountains of the Middle Kingdom to the pirate lair of a serial killer and straight into conflict with her own villain, the Queen of Hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After that premiere I couldn’t NOT write something. This may very well turn into a much longer thing involving sexy rescues and falling love bits. We’ll see.

There were few things as irritating as destiny. It seemed to always rear its fickle little head in the face of simpering lovers and starry eyed warriors. And it seemed to enjoy nothing more than smiling at Regina before crushing everything about her.

Destiny took her lover away. Destiny took her son away. Destiny had her walking back home cold and alone in order to form a plan to rescue a woman she despised.

Emma Swan was her destiny apparently. The mewling child had grown into a striking woman with her mother’s eyes, her father’s hair and fortunately none of the traits of either of her grandfathers. 

They’d waged war over a long season in Storybrooke were the days grew cold and the leaves fell from the trees for the first time in twenty eight years. And Emma won. Henry made his choice.

And then Swan had to go and be… **good**. She had to protect Regina over and over again and throw herself in harms way for their son. Regina couldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t have. 

That was a mark of the weak. Showing kindness and grace to your enemy? It led to crushed hearts in the stable hay.

But Swan acted as though the consequences were not real…or as though…as though she didn’t care about what could happen as long as she did what her conscience demanded.

She had deserved to go tumbling down that portal into the oblivion. Idealism, no matter how masked by churlishness, should meet its end as quickly as possible.

And her mother had gone down too. How fitting! They could spend eternity in darkness talking about how they always did “the right thing” even when it cost others something dear.

Why did Henry have to make this one demand of her? Why did he have to be so innocent and kind and untouched by the ravages of worldliness?

And why did she have to oblige him?

She could have ripped Charming apart and flung Red through the window and whisked Henry away despite his protests. She could have dug into his mind and changed everything that made him good and finally have a son who never looked at her with fear and disdain.

But she would have lost the boy that demanded Emma protect her and the one she’d held in her arms ten years ago and the one who crawled into her laps during thunderstorms when he was three.

She would not lose that boy for all the world.

And if she had to delve into the nothingness of oblivion just to earn his love? She’d do it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a story has formed fully in my head! This is my first time really writing the characters of OUAT so feedback is much appreciated and rewarded with faster turnaround on chapters.

Maintaining control of Storybrooke was no easier as Evil Queen than it had been as Mayor. The people still scurried out of her way and sought to please or avoid her rather than accomplish their jobs effectively. The only benefit was that with magic she could turn the worst offenders into toads, lamps and one very fetching horse.

Though Charming would inevitably find out, toss his sword over his shoulder like a lumberjack with his axe and demand she fix what she’d done.

It was irritating, but he held her son hostage with his storybook heroics and tales of dashing bravery. Apparently Henry loved a good prince but was repulsed by a mother who could turn his enemies to ash with a snap of her fingers.

It was active work trying to discover how to be the mother Henry wanted. She had to **pay attention** to the citizens who lobbed idiotic insults her way and showed no grasp of the curse, the world, or their improved circumstances.

In Storybrooke homelessness didn’t exist (unless one was the errant princess Kathryn). Poverty wasn’t present. But freewill—no matter what they said—existed. She ruled the town as a fiefdom because its people couldn’t be bother to exercise the rights she and their new homeland afforded them. The dwarves weren’t condemned to a lifetime in the mines. The fairies’ vows of chastity only mattered as much as they desired. Princes could cheat and Snow White could have a tawdry one night stand with the suspicious Doctor Whale.

In Storybrooke they weren’t beholden to archaic natural laws that turned sixteen year olds into brides and stepmothers and forced a man to live an eternity as a **cricket**. 

She couldn’t fathom why Henry admired these fools but she could—she had to—respect his decision. Because otherwise she was just her mother—another evil witch dragging the world into the past to suit their own futures.

Two weeks after she watched her son disappear around the topiaries with his bucolic grandfather, Charming arrived on her doorstep. It was late in the evening but he looked remarkably awake. She steeled herself in preparation for another demand, “If this is about that woodsman I’m not giving him his hands back until he agrees to stop trying to bury an axe in my skull.”

He frowned, “The Woodsman is in the jail currently and will be staying there until he’s cooled off. I’m not here about him.”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, “Then why are you here Charming?” She hadn’t used magic on anyone else…at least in the last two days and her investigation into what Rumple was up to had kept her too busy to bother Charming or his band of merry sycophants.

The prince narrowed his eyes and squared his jaw like he was about to face a great beast. Regina tried not to take offense. “I need your help,” he finally managed to ask.

The silky smile that spread across her lips wasn’t on purpose. Nor did she **mean** to feel pleasure at hearing his request. But it was just so delicious. The great Prince Charming needing **her** help. Sneaking into **her** home late at night to make a request.

“And what sort of help could that possibly be?”

He pulled a browned piece of parchment out of his pocket. It didn’t tear with his violent handling despite looking quite delicate. Which meant it was magic: another piece of flotsam that had drifted from one world to the next. 

She held out her hand at the parchment obediently flew from his hand into hers. Her lips pursed at the intricate graphs and computations that someone had penned.

“I’m told it’s a recipe to create a portal.”

“You were told right,” by someone very clever. This magic wasn’t the type bottled for any prince or princess’s use. This was real magic. A form of manipulating the world that required a quick mind and a breadth of understanding that very few in town could be capable of. 

Very, **very** few.

“Who gave this to you,” she asked.

“That’s not important.”

“I disagree.” If it was Gold than he was up to something. 

“The Blue Fairy found it.”

She arched an eyebrow, “And just gave it to you?”

“Without fairy dust she can’t do what’s needed there.”

“But I can.” Of course. They needed her to manipulate magic as prescribed on the parchment. For the moment she was the only person in town whom was capable of it.

“You say you want to redeem yourself. This is the way.”

She rolled her eyes, “Charming I told my son that in confidence. Henry. Not you.”

“This is about Henry’s mother. His grandmother—“

She folded the parchment up and slipped it into her pocket, “Yes, I’m well aware of who we’re discussing here. I might harbor little ill will towards your daughter but your wife is another story entirely.”

“So you won’t help,” he challenged.

She really didn’t want to. The magic demanded was exhausting and the computations required to create an effective portal would be…extensive. Her talents were much better suited to dealing with Rumple—not trying to return to a land she fled to rescue two women that hated her.

“I will,” because Henry asked it of her. “But I’ll need time. I trust you can give me that?”

He narrowed his eyes again. Always so suspicious! Was it really that difficult for the man to believe she’d do something kind at the request of her only child?

“I’ll try to discourage anyone from assassinating you for the next two days,” he finally obliged.

She smiled, “Thank you.”

 

####

She had a solution to their predicament within twenty-four hours. It took another night of musings to finally settle on what she would tell Charming though. She packed a bag, changed into something more befitting traipsing through forests and drove to Mary Margaret’s little loft, where Charming sat easily at the dinner table with Granny, Red and her son.

“What are you doing here Regina,” Charming asked stiffly.

She tore her eyes away from her son, who was stunned as the rest of them. “I’ve solved our problem.”

Charming threw his napkin on the table and scrambled out of his chair. “You can do it.” So excited.

“Yes.”

He started looking for his sword—ignoring his confused grandson and the two werewolves he’d no doubt leave Henry in the care of. 

“You can rescue my mom,” Henry asked. And for once there was no petulance, anger or fear in his voice. Just awe.

Inadvertently she smiled, “I can,” then to Charming, “and I do mean only me.”

Red was now standing too and eying Regina warily. Like she was about to turn them all to ash and cackle madly. Charming came closer, the menace returning to his countenance as quickly as it had last disappeared.

“What do you mean?”

She wanted to sigh, because she had no desire to do what had been asked of her, but seeing Charming so irritated and knowing that she would have to steal his thunder made her smile instead, “I mean I can create the portal here easily enough but I’ll need to be on the other side to send anyone back.”

He sagged, “So you’re going with me?”

“No,” she said carefully, as though she were speaking to a child, “I mean I’m going alone.” She hurried before he could protest, “Creating the portal requires energy. I could get us both there easily enough, but bringing four of us back isn’t an option.”

That spawned a sneer on Charming’s face. He stepped closer and Granny stood too. Whether to help Red hold him back or help him throttle Regina she had no idea—nor did she care to learn. She kept the beatific mask up and refused to step back. 

“So you stay,” he snarled.

No. She stepped forward, looked up at him with as much menace as she could muster. “I’m doing this for my son Charming. Staying isn’t an option for me.”

“Grandpa.” Henry’s voice snapped them both out of the pissing contest they’d nearly entered and they broke apart. “Please,” he pleaded.

To Charming. Not to her.

“She can do it, I know she can.”

She couldn’t escape the brittle joy she felt at his words. It was a funny feeling—having more than her son’s respect—but his…admiration. He came around the table and looked up at her.

“You will bring her back, right?”

She bent at the waist so she could look him in the eye, “I will,” she promised.

He studied her with the shrewdness that fit him and few other children his age well. He was such a smart boy. Smarter than any she’d known. Smarter than his grandfather or his great grandfathers. 

“Thank you,” he whispered. Like he’d seen something in her eyes. Like he…like he believed her.

She bit her cheek to keep from saying or doing something revealing in front of Charming and his friends. 

It was time. She straightened up and pulled the parchment from her pocket. “Yes, and I’ll need your help Charming.”

“What?” His trust would be harder to earn. That would be upsetting if she cared.

“I need an item of theirs. Something I can use to find them on the other side.”

His brow furrowed in laborious thought. But Henry’s face brightened. He ran to the bedroom and retrieved a pair of scissors. Before anyone could ask what possible connection Emma or Snow had to the scissors Henry cut off a lock of his own hair.

“I’m related to both of them right? And they care about me? So this—“

“Is perfect Henry,” she leaned in, “very clever,” she said conspiratorially. 

He almost preened, but caught himself at the last moment. She took the hair from his little hand and pushed it into a locket she’d brought with her—a good witch always had an extra one on their person.

That was it then. She’d said her goodbye and she’d retrieved what she needed. It was time to go.

But, first she knelt, ignored the eyes of the three other adults, and pulled her son into a hug she hoped he didn’t shy away from entirely. “I’ll be back,” she whispered into his ear.

She thought she felt him squeeze his arms around her, but it might simply have been hope on her part.

Stepping back Regina held out her palm. The computations ran through her head like a computer and purple smoke billowed from her fingertips. A wind caught the inside of her tailored riding jacket and it flared around her hips. An opening formed. One too small for the others to see. To them it would then look like she was sucked into the portal she created. In reality she shrunk herself down to a size they could not fathom and forced herself through the most minuscule of holes between worlds.

It was only as the old world rushed out to greet her large and dark and familiar that she tasted some other hand in her magic. She fell into existence in the remains of the Enchanted Forrest and realized that Charming had lied.

It wasn’t the Blue Fairy that had given him that parchment.

It was Rumpelstiltskin.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this story is back! After watching how the first half of the season panned out I decided to return to this one and then veer it far and away from canon. So get prepared for an AU romp full of totalitarian regimes, witch fights, and some long and lingering looks that eventually lead to lusty nights.

The air smelled like cinders. Permeating a forest of evergreens and afternoon rains and rich earth was the smell of all that had been destroyed. It was a bitter smell that clung to her clothes.

Regina had finally come home and in her absence the world had burned to ashes and grown up again. There was no time to ponder the destruction or how one little piece of the land still had green trees and wildlife.

Rumpelstiltskin had manipulated her into traveling to the Enchanted Forest and she had to get back to Storybrooke and find out why. Her mind raced over the spell Charming had given her and she attempted, once more, to open the portal.

But nothing happened. No smoke fumed for her fingertips. The world did not grow large as she grew so very small. Nothing happened. She held out her hand and only a steady mist fell to greet it.

Damn it.

She took a steadying breath and a moment to think of Henry: standing by his grandfather and watching her disappear with a mixture of awe and horror and something that might one day be love. She had to get back to him and she had to stop Rumpelstiltskin from doing whatever he was up to.

Again she extended her hand and again saw the way to Storybrooke so clearly. The energies, invisible to most, swirled into a vortex at her fingertips. Next they should have manifested as the purple smoke that was her signature and a portal should have yawned open before her.

But the energies sputtered and drifted into a calm and nothing happened.

“Damn it,” she exclaimed. 

She balled her hand into a fist and ran through more calculations. She’d need something more here, and some weak point between worlds. A remnant of a portal could work.

But what then? It would take days to find a way back and if she returned without Emma and Snow White?

She could picture Henry’s eyes as they dulled to her once more. Losing Emma had set Henry against her. Coming back without her would likely ruin whatever fragments of a relationship that still remained.

She was stuck then, still trapped within a quest more befitting Charming or his myriad of princesses and princelings. She rooted the locket filled with Henry’s hair out of her pocket and studied it. 

The filigreed container shined almost blue in the moonlight. She’d need a workshop of spells, potions and supplies to enchant it to work properly. Then maybe she’d bequeath it to Swan so she’d have a way of finding her perpetually lost family and Regina could stay out of these inconvenient messes.

Without access to her vault of spells and potions Regina had to channel her own magic into it. She wasn’t Rumpelstiltskin, an embodiment of magic, so anything she did couldn’t be permanent without a great deal of effort and energy she had no desire to expend.

She pooled a little of herself into the locket and watched it twist in an invisible wind until it seemed to hang in a single direction. A glance at the stars overhead, familiar even after twenty-eight years, told her she was bound for the west and that she was very, **very** far from home. She re-shouldered her bag and tightened the strap and began walking.

 

####

Dragon? 

Check.

Ogres?

Check.

Noble knight?

Check?

Evil witch queen?

Very much a check.

Emma just needed a fairy godmother and a talking animal friend and she’d be alive in Henry’s book.

Okay. She **was** alive in Henry’s book. Maybe more alive? It was confusing. Almost as confusing as a world where they served her roasted chimera with a berry sauce that could turn a person blue if they ate too much.

Snow, whom she still wasn’t ready to call “Mom,” settled onto the bench next to her and they stared into the fire in companionable silence. Whether it was a holdover from Emma’s friendship with Mary Margaret, or some unquantifiable familial connection she didn’t want to thing about, she didn’t care. They could still sit in peace and quiet and it wouldn’t feel weird.

Which was nice because everything else felt weird. The air was weird and the people were weird and the truth of her birth was **really** weird. Being able to sit on a bench and not say a word was weird too! But a relief. On the other side of the fire Sleeping Beauty—scratch that—Aurora was fiddling with her skirt and a needle and thread and getting some sewing advice from Mu-frickin-lan.

And it wasn’t going well.

“I am not an army Mulan so I would appreciate it if you stopped ordering me about as one.”

Beside her Snow rolled her eyes. She did that a lot. Must be genetic.

“The stitch you’re attempting is far too time consuming. If you were to use a running stitch—“

“I would be stuck sitting in front of the fire tomorrow repairing the repair.” She set her skirt down and glared at Mulan, “Have you ever actually used a needle and thread?”

“I have. And I also do not prick my finger and fall into a dreamless sleep for more than twenty-eight years when I do.”

“I think that was technically a spindle, not a needle,” Emma opined. The other three women stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “I saw that movie at least! Though your boyfriend kind of failed killing the dragon. It ended up under a library where I had to throw a sword at it.”

“You killed Maleficent,” Aurora asked sharply—with just a hint of awe in her voice. Okay so she didn’t do well against ogres and her mom and Mulan thought she was useless. Whatever. She killed a dragon witch queen thing with a sword.

But Mulan didn’t care, “What is a movie?”

Snow sighed loudly, “A story. It moves. Emma can I talk to you…over there?”

What had she done this time? It seemed like every time she opened her mouth or did anything Snow was there to tell her it was all wrong. Like she should just **know** how to operate in a fairytale land she was cast out of as a baby.

She followed her and the sound of Mulan and Aurora’s bickering faded away.

“What’s up?”

Snow glanced back at the other two women and dropped her voice, “Maybe don’t brag about killing evil witches?”

She snorted, “Why? Is she gonna get jealous?”

“No, but any number of things could be out in the forest watching us and we don’t need anyone, especially someone like Cora, finding out anything more about the other world.”

“Okay so I’ll just what? Stay absolutely quiet?”

She shrugged like she thought it was a feasible idea.

“Mary Margaret—“

She tilted her head and gave her a look usually only reserved for the under-eighteen set. It was too maternal for comfort. “Just avoid talking about over there.”

“But ‘over there’ is all I know.”

“You know about ogres,” she suggested.

Emma rolled her eyes.

“And you know about—uh…” The loquacious warrior queen that everyone respected was at a loss for words—reminding Emma of the elementary school teacher seemingly lost forever.

“Exactly. How about I just avoid personal stuff?”

“That—that could work.”

She clapped the other woman on the shoulder and was struck by how much joy Mary Margaret seemed to take from the touch. It was a struggle not to recoil at the sight.

Not that she wasn't a little happy. This was the long lost mom she'd never wanted to find! She wasn't an alcoholic or a drug addict or in prison or hating Emma. She genuinely seemed to love her, and if Henry's book was right she stuck her in a wardrobe and sent her to another land just to protect her from a curse.

That was a pretty maternal thing to do. Emma had kind of done the same thing when she'd given Henry up. Only…more metaphorically.

And she and Henry had both ended up in pretty crummy places. She in a series of foster homes where all the other kids watched her warily and the foster parents wondered what was wrong with her that even being blond and white she couldn’t be adopted. He with the archetypal evil queen in a town frozen in time for nearly thirty years.

She had to remind herself of that every time Mary Margaret looked at her like she had something to say. They **were** alike. They’d sacrificed years with their children to given them a better chance—never knowing what horrors they were sending them into.

Only Henry found Emma. He sought out the mother who’d given him up with starry eyed hopes of finding some heroine. And Emma had never sought out her own mother. She hadn’t even thought about it in years.

She’d gotten used to being on her own. Grown accustomed to having no parents and now she had one still watching her, her eyes particularly green in the firelight.

“You okay,” she asked.

Emma tried a smile. “Sure.”

Mary Margaret gave her a crooked smile that Emma had seen in half a dozen photos of herself. “I guess this can be a little weird huh?”

“Weird might be understating it a bit. We fought an evil witch tonight Mary Margaret. One that’s actually the **mother** of another one. That’s just—“

“Crazy,” she supplied helpfully.

“Yeah,” she shrugged before slumping back onto the log they’d been sharing. “Though it kind of makes Regina make more sense.”

Mary Margaret tilted her head in confusion.

“I mean, her mother is a power hungry, crazy murderer. That’s **got** to mess a kid up.”

Mary Margaret seemed to absorb that. Then she sort of laughed. Almost dismissively. Emma didn’t have time to get irritated though. Her mother sat beside her, her elbows on her knees in a decidedly unprincess-like fashion. “I was raised by a power hungry, crazy murderer and I turned out okay,” she finally said.

As Emma was pretty sure her grandparents weren’t evil witches that meant she was talking about Regina. “But does she really count? I mean, it wasn’t like she was your mom.”

“More an older sister,” she said thoughtfully, “and, I guess, it’s a bit of a lie. She didn’t turn murderous until I was an adult.”

It was such a weird concept to wrap her head around. As weird as sitting on a log in a magical land with her 20-something mother. The other mother of her son was out there in the world and probably pushing seventy. She’d **raised** her own mom and then turned around and spent years trying to murder her.

And now… “Why does she hate you so much anyways?”

Mary Margaret shoulders lifted almost into a shrug but stopped just short, her eyes watered briefly, “I betrayed her trust when I was a little girl and her mother killed her fiancé because of it.”

“Woah.” That was… “So she’s blamed you for something you did as a kid?”

“What was it you said about having Cora as a mom? About messing a kid up?”

“And apparently perpetuating the abuse. I had a few foster families like that. Endlessly horrible because they were never taught any better.”

She got up to poke at the fire just so she could miss the utter agony on Snow’s face. Emma was going to have to work on that one. She’d gotten used to being all pithy, or whatever the word was, when it came to growing up. Making fun of all the horrible stuff was a hell of a lot easier than stopping to consider just how awful it was.

Except when she was faced with the mom who’d thought she’d sent her kid to a better place. She felt almost **guilty** mentioning it in front of her.

Across the fire Mulan was burrowed beneath her cloak with her eyes closed and her head at Aurora’s feet. The young princess was still patching up her skirts but paused to look down and watch Mulan fondly. When she realized she was being watched she flushed a deep red and pointedly ignored Emma’s gaze.

“If you’re going to be up a while patching skirts you mind taking first watch?”

“I will,” Snow offered from her spot on the log, “you rest.”

Emma found she was just a little too tired to discuss it further. They’d have a long walk back to ogre-free island ahead of them and burning down their only way home while battling a witch had kind of taken it out of her.

She used her jacket as a pillow and pulled her blanket up over her shoulders then spared at glance at Snow. She had re-situated herself so her bow and a drawn arrow were across her knee and her back was to the giant tree providing them cover.

She wasn’t Emma’s roommate Mary Margaret anymore. She got that in her head, but it was still taking time to sink in. This was her **mom**. Her badass bow wielding super mom. Snow White. And out there in another world the evil queen of every fairytale ever told was raising Emma’s son. That was even harder to grasp. Snow was so very different from Mary Margaret. Forceful and assured. Mary Margaret’s endless kindness was tempered and there was a wary caution in Snow’s every step.

But Regina. Regina had always sort have been the Evil Queen everyone talked about. Cruel. Vindictive. Obsessive. She could actually see how the woman she’d been trying to raise a child with was the crazy bitch who condemned a whole world to live in **Maine**. Even after the curse had broken and everyone around her changed in the span of a breath Regina was still…a woman who loved with uncommon ferocity and hated with absolute abandon.

“Hey,” Snow said softly, “get some rest.”

Everything had twisted and changed around Emma, and she found herself just really wanting something **known**. Something constant. But in a land with magic and ogres that was virtually impossible to find.

She missed it all. Particularly Henry. And Regina. She missed there being someone she may not like but at least she **knew**.

 

####

Of course she couldn’t have transported directly into her castle. Or even into her kingdom. No. Gold’s little magic trick couldn’t be **that** convenient. 

It couldn’t even send her to a kingdom remotely near her own. Instead it had sent her over the waters to a kingdom so different from her own that she hadn’t even bothered to bring anyone from there over.

Though she might not have been able to if she’d tried. There were some kingdoms—some whole worlds even—with magic potent enough to protect its people from the curse. 

The Middle Kingdom was such a place. She could feel the protective magic in every breath she took. It shimmered like gold on the leaves, giving the land an ethereal glow visible only to the most potent of magic users.

And it itched.

She’d placed her Charming family compass around her neck letting the heat of it’s magic guide her towards the missing princess and her daughter. She hadn’t wanting risking questions in the Middle Kingdom. It was bad enough being a foreigner. The few travelers she’d seen on the road that night eyed her with abject distrust. It made her miss cloaks and hoods. They weren’t quite as obvious as a divinely tailored coat and expensive boots. They were bulky and unattractive and utterly pedestrian.

The perfect sort of clothes for the Evil Queen to disguise herself in.

She came to a full stop in the center of the road.

Disguise.

Disguises.

Once long ago she’d been almost skilled at them. She’d apparently spent so long in a world without magic she’d forgotten something as simple a disguise. She was **the Evil Queen**. The greatest sorceress of her age. A woman so skilled that even Maleficent and Rumpelstiltskin got nervous around her. And she couldn’t remember that she had magic capable of completely changing how others perceived her.

She closed her eyes and took a moment, inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth. Magic rushed over her warmly. Little fingers of power brushing over every part of her. 

When she opened her eyes again she expected to see a shuffling old woman of the Middle Kingdom, but her hands were still unblemished by the sun, and her clothes still the ones she’d carefully chosen from her closet back in Storybrooke.

Around her the gold touch of Middle Kingdom magic shimmered more vibrantly a moment, moving out from her in a wave as it absorbed the magic she’d performed and dispersed it smoothly.

…

Of course. Gold’s spell didn’t just send her to a kingdom days from her own, it sent her to one where her magic could barely be used. She probably couldn’t even toss a good size fireball without the Middle Kingdom’s protective spells snatching it from the air and consuming it.

“I’ll kill him,” she said to the empty road.

Being a road it stayed dark and silent and ominous. But she meant it. When she got back to Storybrooke she’d skin that crocodile alive and wear him like a cloak. Probably while naked. And cackling.

No. 

Henry would find that particularly Evil Queenish.

Maybe she’d just murder him and dump his body into the sea.

Yes. A cruel smile pulled at her mouth. She’d kill the little toad when she finally made it back.

The locket against her breast burned hotly as it absorbed what magic the spells around her had not. She winced at the sensation. It was all together unpleasant. Not a burn, but warm like bathwater or a lover’s caress.

She’d forgotten the feeling, and having it emanate from a locket of her son’s hair was…unsettling.

But everything was. That horrid woman had arrived in her town and undone all her careful work and in the process torn Regina down. Unmade her in a way no curse or whispers of a child princess could.

And now there was a warmth of actual **love** apparently blossoming in the locket on her chest.

The sooner she’d found those wretched women and returned the better.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The characters found here are borrowed liberally from Chinese myth. My wheelhouse is Greek myth so any errors are entirely mine.

As expected, when Regina finally came to the first town larger than two shacks and a mule she was met with open stares. She briefly wondered how she should behave around the people. Should she look demure and avoid eye contact—a terrified stranger in a strange land? Or should she be open and brazenly meet each stare?

She had little time to consider it. At the center of town was a massive wall that seemed to be made entirely out of jade and gold and marble and cut the town in half. A bevy of guards flowed out of its gates. Their halberds and spears stopped but inches from her, enframing her in sharp edges that looked as though they could cut through a single hair with nary a whisper.

The men and women were all armored from head to toe, their faces hid by featureless masks with only the wet glint of their eyes in the shadows letting her know they were alive.

A woman moved through them like silk over fingers. She was dressed in red and gold from head to toe with her raven colored hair held up in a fabulous assortment of braids and combs. White teeth flashed between blood red lips as she moved close to Regina.

“A stranger come to a strange land,” she said provocatively.

Regina was reminded of herself years before she was a mother and a mayor. Though this woman’s cleavage was hidden by her robe and dress and the evil gleam that had always been in Regina’s eye was merely…playful in this woman’s.

Regina could probably turn her and her guards into ash with word. Though there was that cloak of shimmering gold magic coating the woman and her guards. That might make it…difficult.

Regina smiled simply and said nothing.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” the woman continued, “its been twenty-eight years since we had a stranger such as yourself. And yet here you are in odd clothes wielding magic on the road and acting as though you…belong.”

Her brown eyes flickered to an unnatural shade of green, like polished jade. Magic pulsated out of her, buffeting Regina in challenge.

“I was cast out,” she said simply. She reached down deep for pity and tears. “The e-e-evil queen discovered me and cast me out.” She hadn’t used that stutter in **years**. It felt rusty on her tongue. “I tried to fight her but—“

She brought her hand up to her mouth and squeezed out one good solid tear.

The woman opposite her narrowed her eyes. “You’re the girl that was to break the curse in the Enchanted Forest.”

Sure. Why not? She nodded meekly, “My s-s-son came and found me but she figured it out and sent me here.”

Even as she said it she wished she’d done the same. Just shoved that woman through Jefferson’s hat months ago. She wasn’t even sure **how** she would have done it, but it would have been immensely satisfying watching Emma’s eyes widen comically as her arms windmilled and she lost her footing, slipping into the oblivion where she’d stay not quite dead but not quite alive either.

She resisted a sneer at her own error.

The woman’s hand reached out to clasp Regina’s wrist. It was unnervingly tight—like a vice. “You poor dear,” she oozed, “Come inside. Rest. Dine. Tell me of this world she condemned you all to.”

Regina nodded, brushing away a tear with her thumb. The woman tugged her back towards the gate, the walls of a palace Regina realized. She was used to turrets and walls so tall it hurt the neck to look at them. But this palace sprawled out behind the gate they entered. It was connected by pathways of crushed rock—diamonds she realized only as the soles of her boots crunched through it.

She hazarded a wary glance at her host. She wasn’t simply a princess or duchess or something. She wasn’t even a queen. Even the most powerful of queens didn’t have pathways of crushed **diamonds** in their palaces. Not unless they wanted to tax their people to death and be overthrown for their wanton attention to ridiculous luxury.

Then they came to an orchard of fragrant peaches.

Regina never ever panicked. Ever. Because panicking led to silly actions. Panicking had nearly lost her son and stuck her on this quest. Panicking meant lives and misery—usually her own.

But Regina knew when to, perhaps, be just a little nervous. While she was **the** Evil Queen and capable of magic beyond anyone in her realm she was still but a queen and, sadly, **mortal**. 

The woman she walked with was not a queen or even an empress. She was the Queen Mother of the West. Xi Wangmu. A deity. Likely one of the architects of the magic that had protected the Middle Kingdom from Regina’s curse. 

Those peaches hanging fat and heavy on the trees weren’t just ordinary peaches. They were the Peaches of Immortality. To eat one would make a mortal effectively **im** mortal. 

Her mouth watered at the very idea of biting into one. She could just picture the way her teeth would cut through the soft skin and how the juicy flesh would burst into her mouth, coating her tongue and gifting her with— 

The Queen Mother noted her gaze, “My orchard.”

“I’ve heard of it,” she said, barely hiding the saliva pooling around her tongue, “Your story is quite legendary in the land we were condemned to.”

She raised a single perfectly onyx eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Our stories are all quite popular there. Beloved even.”

“Even your’s savior?”

She didn’t wince, because wincing would be weakness she could not afford in the Queen Mother’s presence, not now that she knew who she was. “No. I’m afraid only finished stories are legends there.”

“Sad,” she said succinctly. She then motioned to a warmly lit building in the middle of the orchard. “Come, sit and eat. Tell me of the world that wicked witch banished you to.”

There was a way she said ‘wicked witch.’ Slyly. Like she knew the lies slipping from Regina’s tongue and sought to goad her into revealing herself.

But Regina was clever. She’d suffered as the wife of King Leopold for ten years. Made him and that simpering daughter of his truly believe she loved them—cared for them. And she’d walked the streets of Storybrooke for twenty-eight years with not one question from its citizens. It was only Henry and his birth mother who had ever seen through her deceptions. And they were…predisposed to rooting out lies.

The Queen Mother was, perhaps, not. She was the most powerful woman in the Middle Kingdom. She was not lied to and she would not expect it.

Regina carefully took her seat at the table. The Queen Mother sat at the head of it and there were but two places left. She looked down at her own place setting, “I didn’t realize you were expecting me.”

“I felt your magic hours ago child.” Regina tried not to bristle at the condescension in the Queen Mother’s voice. She was supposed to be a twenty-something savior ignorant to the ways of the world. Not the very smart Evil Queen. “I knew having so rare a visitor in my land was reason enough to invite you to dine.”

“And those joining us?”

A girl stepped out of the shadows of the orchard and was lit by the soft glow of the lanterns overhead. She was gorgeous like her mother, but the rod of steel that seemed to support the Queen Mother was absent in the daughter. Her eyes roamed Regina’s face before turning down to the floor.

“My daughter Zhinu. This palace is hers.”

“The orchard as well?” 

The Queen Mother’s sharp eyes were on Regina in an instance. She returned the gaze evenly. Like that silly Emma Swan might in her situation. 

“No. The palace is hers. The orchard is mine. As is its guardian.”

There was the sound of feet beating against the crushed diamonds and then a furry man burst into the light breathlessly. He was somehow large and lithe all at once, with bulging muscles moving beneath clothes of the finest silk and a layer of fur that covered him from head to toe. His face was odd too, like it was somehow caught between the face of a man and a monkey.

“Sun Wukong,” the Queen Mother supplied, “the orchard’s guardian.”

“For the moment,” he said with a rakish grin. His eyes darted to Regina so suddenly she was actually taken aback, “and this must be the Enchanted Forest’s Evil Queen.” He snatched up her hand and pressed his wet lips to it almost sensuously. “An honor,” he whispered against her skin.

Regina yanked her hand back and only barely resisted the impulse to wipe it clean with the napkin by her plate. “Not the Queen,” she reiterated, “The savior. I’ve been banished and am on a journey to find a way home.”

His eyes were so astute Regina actually felt sweat bead at the back of her neck just suffering under his gaze. While his mistress might not be accustomed to liars the Monkey King was another story entirely. He **thrived** on lies. Surviving a dinner with him, especially without her magic, would be a…challenge.

“That is one,” he noted, but he didn’t elaborate and the food soon arrived. Food fit for the most powerful creatures in all of the Middle Kingdom. 

And there was Regina, stuck at a table with three legends of lore.

In her head she could hear Swan, “This is way better than the Great Wall of China place at the end of my block back in Boston.” It was incredibly uncouth, but so was the savior. The savior Regina needed to be if she was to survive her dinner intact. So she managed the closet to a goofy grin she’d ever be able to conjure and said the same thing.

The Monkey King’s eyes danced in the light. “That’s two,” he said with mirth.

Well.

This was troublesome.

The master of lies was counting each of hers.

 

####

“You know there’s this place down at the end of my block in Boston? Best General Tso’s chicken you’ll ever have.”

All three of Emma’s companions shared a look **with each other**. That bizarre “she’s crazy” look they seemed to all share every time she opened her mouth. It was stupid. They were the fairytale characters brought to life. Not her. If she was hungry and wanted to talk about her favorite food in the world that she hadn’t had in a year because Storybrooke had about the most boring restaurants on the planet than that was **her** business. 

“Chinese food,” Mary Margaret asked, “why are you thinking about Chinese food?”

“Because I’m hungry and for some reason I’ve got this crazy craving for really good Chinese food.”

She’d just woken up in the middle of the night with warmth spreading across her chest. It had been pleasant, but also sort of like peeing in the pool, which was the opposite of pleasant. But when she’d tugged her shirt down to look at her chest she’d just seen her bra and bare skin and when she’d let her shirt go she’d looked up to find Mulan sharpening her sword and looking at her like she was nuts.

“Dream,” she’d supplied. And Mulan had not accepted. She’d just stared at her a little longer and then returned to sharpening the sword.

About two hours laters Emma had found herself staring up at a starless sky and suffering from cravings so bad she would have thought she were pregnant if she hadn’t practically re-virginfied since coming to Storybrooke. Aurora and Mary Margaret had woken up around the same time, Sleeping Beauty because of a bad dream and Mary Margaret because apparently now that she had all of Snow White’s memories in her brain she was the lightest damned sleeper on the planet.

Mary Margaret looked down at Emma’s chest. “Must be something to do with whatever woke you up earlier?” She scooted across the ground on her knees and checked Emma’s forehead with her hand. “You feeling okay.”

“Yeah, peachy.”

 

####

Regina slumped against the door to the quarters the Queen Mother had graciously lent her for the night. She’d spent an hour and a half telling tales of Storybrooke and the world she’d come to call home and noted each time Sun Wukong spoke. It was never whole sentences after the first few. Just numbers. One for each lie she uttered.

But he spoke less and less as the dinner proceeded and Regina’s lies became more clever. Finally the dinner came to an end and she allowed herself a moment to exhale.

The Monkey King excused himself with a giggle, disappearing amongst the fruit laden trees beyond.

“I cannot apologize for him,” the Queen Mother said, “he’s a fickle demon and he’s unhappy with his charge as guardian of my orchard.”

“If he dislikes it so much why do you have him do it?”

The Queen Mother leaned onto the table with her elbows and watched the shadows he’d disappeared into. “He came here from the mountains and begged a place at my court. I put him in charge of the stables.”

Even now a pang at the word rung Regina’s heart. She’d all but forbidden the word when she’d become queen. The stables were the domain only of the dead as far as she was concerned.

“But he became angry with his charge and let all the horses go.”

“And your orchard doesn’t have legs.”

“Precisely. So now he watches my orchard and beats to death anyone who dare touches my fruit.” There was a threat in those words. Unfurled from her tongue like half a promise.

“I’m not interested in your fruit. I just want to get home.”

The Queen Mother’s nails were long and red like blood tipped talons. She dragged one thoughtfully across her chin. “And how do you hope to get home?”

“There’s magic in the remnants of the Enchanted Forest.”

“There is. It’s primal and messy stuff. Our magic here is finer.”

The magic of the Middle Kingdom was Scotch or a finely aged wine. There was a rich quality to it that begged Regina to reach out and stroke it—caressing it with her skilled mind. But, “I need magic that can breach the veil between worlds.”

“Passage between worlds is forbidden here.”

“I know,” she said quickly. Too quickly. The Queen Mother’s dark eyes narrowed and flashed jade again. “Before I tried to save the Enchanted Forest I was something of a scholar of myths,” she said lamely. The longer the night went the more she veered from Emma’s voice. The lies became easier, smoother, closer to Regina’s own truths.

“They speak of our magic there,” Zhinu asked. Regina had nearly forgotten the young woman was even present.

“Yes,” she lied and thought she heard another number whispered on the breeze. “Twenty-four,” it said. The twenty-four lies she’d spoken that night.

“And you think you’ll find that magic in what remains of the Enchanted Forest?”

“I know I will.” She had to. Without it she and Emma and Snow would all be stuck forever. Her fingers leapt to the locket of Henry’s hair between her breasts. “I can…feel the magic I need. And I think I can find it.”

“So,” the Queen Mother’s smile was smooth like the Cheshire Cat’s, “you’re on another quest.”

“An eternal one it would seem,” her daughter said.

“Yes. It **would** seem that way.”

She dared the Monkey King to number that statement as a lie, but there was only silence in the orchard beyond.

 

###

“It’s not natural!”

“Mary Margaret—“

“Waking up in the middle of the night because something peed on your chest and then craving Chinese food is **weird** Emma.”

“So’s being stuck in a fairytale land. A guy offered me chimera the other day!”

“Chimera is actually a delicacy in the Middle Kingdom.” That was Mulan. Being oh so helpful from her spot by Aurora.

Who wrinkled her nose. “I always find it to tough.”

“We braise it with rice wine and scallions.”

“Ooo that would make it more palatable.”

“Neither of you are helping,” her mom said harshly. She then just sort of rudely reached for Emma’s chest like it was hers to just go touching. “It must be some sort of magic—“

Emma slapped her hand away. “So what if it is? A craving for Chinese and the weird warm thing is hardly curses and evil is it?”

“ **Most** magic is curses and evil Emma.”

“Not true. **I’m** the product of true love according to Henry’s book. That can’t be evil.”

“No,” her mother sat back on her heels. “You’re not evil, but Emma, you’re **powerful** in a way most magic isn’t. And now that we’re here you have to be careful. This could be someone feeding on you or tracking your or—“

“Well, that’s just kind of creepy.”

“Yeah. And possible.”

Emma looked down at her chest again. She felt fine—besides the craving for Chinese, and even that was going away, replaced with a bouncy nervousness and relief that was just—well as bizarre feeling as the cravings and the whole warmth thing to begin with.

Her fingers splayed across the flesh and bone between her hand and her heart. It wasn’t that long ago that magic was reserved for Disney cartoons. Now she had it **in** her and someone, somewhere, might be trying to get it out.

 

###

Nerves and relief warred inside of her. She’d dined with a **goddess**. Years of tutelage beneath the Dark One must have paid off because she’d survived the ordeal intact and with the Queen Mother promising her aid on her quest in the morning.

All the same. Regina was a little frazzled. She could handle sorceresses and queens and empresses and even fairies as old as their world itself, but the Queen Mother of the West… Like the Blue Fairy she was older than dark magic itself, but where the Blue Fairy used her magic only to maintain some sense of balance in her own little fairy brain the Queen Mother used her magic to maintain power over her entire land. She was **comfortable** with power like a queen.

It was a disturbing thing to witness someone so powerful and so completely at home with it. Even Rumpelstiltskin had always seemed to loathe what he was a little.

She made her way to where warm water flowed into a basin, powered and heated by some furnace deep beneath the palace. Her own palace, and every palace in the Enchanted Forest, had been without indoor plumbing. It was apparently a mystery to her land’s engineers and one of the many things she’d adored about the new world. A “modern convenience” is what the people of the new land called it. 

She splashed some water on her face and fought a yawn that touch of it seemed to prompt.

She’d been up for—well actually she had no idea what time it was or how long she’d been up. She just knew that it seemed to have been for days even though she was also certain she’d only just hugged Henry goodbye hours before.

She shook her head to clear the cobwebs, but they only grew faster and prompted another yawn.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d deal with her fatigue and the Queen Mother and her quest to win back her son’s love. For tonight she could rest.

The princess Zhinu had other ideas. She did not knock at Regina’s door or even pound her first against it. She flew through it, slamming it behind her and moving forward breathlessly until she was inches from Regina.

She’d been in the process of removing her coat and her arms were tangled in fabric. “Can I help you,” she asked, attempting to remain dignified despite her position.

“Twenty-four times,” the princess said.

The Monkey King’s jovial voice sounded in her head. “What,” she lied.

“Twenty-four lies you dared speak in my mother’s presence. Sun Wukong counted.”

“I don’t—“

“They know you are not the Enchanted Forest’s savior.”

“Do they?” Thankfully her voice didn’t **actually** squeak. It just felt like it. “And who do they think I am?”

“A thief are you not? Come for my mother’s fruit?”

No. That really wasn’t who she was. She shouldered her coat back on and stood up straight.

“Only a thief would dare lie when the Monkey King was in attendance,” Zhinu continued.

“Ah.” 

Regina had never been much of a thief. Barring her adventure with Jefferson to Wonderland she’d usually only bid **others** to commit the acts for her. The only thing she could assume was that her play at being Emma Swan at dinner had worked. She’d somehow channelled the woman’s character right down to her grubby thieving mannerisms.

She smiled in what she assumed was a rakish manner, being far from rakish herself. “Is that what I am? A daring thief?”

The princess’s eyes searched Regina’s face and her hand wrapped around Regina’s wrist. “Please. I have need of your skills.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I need a clever thief to help me escape the palace.”

Regina plucked the offending hand from her wrist. “Than I suspect you should look outside the palace walls.”

The girl’s face fell, “But surely we can find a common cause. Please. I need your help.”

“And I need to survive. Something that will be very difficult to do if I earn the wrath of your mother. Need I remind you her magic pervades this land?”

“But you have magic too,” she said so earnestly, “My mother sensed when you first arrived. She says it’s powerful.”

“I’m flattered, but my magic doesn’t…it doesn’t work right here.”

“Because you used it while my mother was awake. She sleeps now. We could alight tonight and—“

“What?” She laughed, “Hope we make it beyond the border before she wakes up? Child I value my life.”

“Yet you lied twenty-four times to my mother. Do you really think she’ll let that go unpunished?”

Zhinu, being one of those simpering and kind little princesses, seemed to regret her threat as soon as she’d said it. She looked away from Regina in shame, even stepping back to form a space between them.

The people of the Enchanted Forest would have told the girl that was a mistake. Regina **preyed** on weakness and respected strength, even the foolish threats of a spoiled princess.

“No,” she murmured, stepping into the girl’s space, “don’t back away now. You’ve delivered a threat dear, embrace it.”

The girl was trembling. “Please. My mother will have you dead by tomorrow if you stay, but if you go—“

“I’ll survive. I’ve gathered as much. Now,” she crooked her finger beneath the girl’s chin and lifted it so she was forced to face Regina properly, “why should I take you with me.”

“Because my true love waits at the border and I need to be with him.”

“How touching, but I fail to see how that’s impetus for me.”

She sighed and blindly reached for something in the little purse she wore at her waist. It was a silk purse with a gold chain drawstring. A delicate little thing unbecoming for an escape from a palace. But finally she drew something out. Something deserving of so rich a bag. It took a moment for Regina’s eyes to focus on it. Then its fragrance reached her nose and her heart beat wildly in her chest.

“Is that—“

“A Peach of Immortality. Plucked from my mother’s garden. Help me escape and you will have a thousand years longer to live.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won’t lie, there may be a Regina/Jack one shot that could consume my life, but I’m still so excited about this fic that you shouldn’t have to worry TOO much.

It was impossible to get much more sleep that night. Mary Margaret was vibrating with concern and Emma found herself a little wary of whatever was going on in her innards too. They put out their fire and put away camp as the sky turned from black to the dull gray of morning and were on the road as the sun peered out from the horizon. The nerves that had plagued her after the cravings were gone and as the sun rose higher in the sky Emma found herself feeling more and more like…well like herself.

Which was weird because she hadn’t realized she **hadn’t** felt like herself before.

“You know,” she muttered, “I really hate magic.”

Mary Margaret snorted. “Join the club,” she said miserably.

“And how come the only people who seem to be any good at it are evil? Why aren’t there good guys who use magic.”

“The Blue Fairy can.”

“The what now?”

“The Blue Fairy—Mother Superior?”

“The head nun is a fairy?”

Mary Margaret nodded.

A laugh bubbled out of Emma and her mother watched her incredulously. “What? That’s **funny**?”

“Well, come on. Regina could have done anything to the big bad super good fairy and she made her into a **nun**?”

Mary Margaret rolled her eyes.

“And she turned you into a school marm.”

She scoffed, “I beg your pardon. I was not a…a **marm**.”

The way she was so mortally offended reminded Emma of the woman who had practically disappeared with the curse’s dissolution. She’d missed her and couldn’t resist a knowing look.

“I wasn’t a marm,” she insisted.

“Sure.”

“I had…dates. With men.”

“You had Whale.”

“In my bed!”

Emma stopped walking, the realization that her mother had just mentioned part of her **sex life** filtering through the amusement. She visibly shuddered. 

“That’s right,” Mary Margaret exclaimed, still on a tear, “I had sex. With a guy. Who was not my husba…” She jerked her head back. “Oh. Oh God.”

“Now I have the images…”

“Oh Emma I’m so sorry…”

Aurora cocked her head to the side, “I thought Snow White was supposed to be virtuous.”

They reached the top of the hill they’d been climbing at that moment. Emma sighed in the most blessed relief she’d **ever** felt. “Oh thank God there’s the island.”

Poor Lancelot’s little oasis lay hidden in a copse of trees a few more miles away. It was still a hike, but it was also a great way to change the subject from **her mother’s sex life**. Thank Christ for small favor—

“Hey Mary Margaret?”

Her mother eyed her warily, clearly thoughts of naked writhing— “Yes?”

“Are we Christian? Like the kingdom or whatever. Is God even a thing here?”

She rolled her eyes, “What would possess you—“

“Because I didn’t really have religion. I mean I had church and church and more church. Usually a megachurch, but what about the ‘family?’ Do we kneel and kick back the wine or are we more of a singing and feeling Jesus through the songs kind of people?”

“I’ve agreed to help idiots,” Mulan muttered, slipping between them shoulder first and not **quite** running towards their haven.

 

####

Breaking out of one of the palaces of the Queen Mother of the West was far easier than Regina expected. In fact all they did was go to the stables, take two horses and ride away. It was the opposite of the daring escape she’d envisioned. But it was staying out of the Queen Mother’s grasp **after** the break that was difficult. Her magic pervaded the land and worked almost like a surveillance system back in Storybrooke would. Her eyes and ears were everywhere and Regina was forced to constantly stay one step ahead, slipping herself and Zhinu into shadows and working the slyest magic she’d ever performed.

That was a particularly interesting challenge. Regina was powerful. One had to be to perform the curse she had. And she was accustomed to relying exclusively on her power to work her magic—or she had twenty-eight years earlier.

But the Queen Mother was a **god** with a power that would always match and then surpass Regina’s. She was forced, instead, to focus on the technical component of her magic, to “outcast” the Queen Mother. Being without magic for twenty-eight years should have left Regina rusty and quickly found, but she was apparently better than she thought.

Mainly because she and Zhinu had yet to be caught.

Zhinu’s horse led them down ancient animal paths that wound laboriously through the forest, sometimes circling back towards the palace before moving forward again. They were overgrown messes fraught with low hanging branches and tangled roots, but the parties searching for them would, according to Zhinu, focus on the very fine man-made roads of the Middle Kingdom instead.

So Regina picked her way through the underbrush and stayed imminently grateful for her own innate skill as a horsewoman. Like magic it had been twenty-eight years since she’d been near a beast, and like magic, the muscle memories were more potent than the passage of time.

“It’s like riding a bike I suppose,” she murmured out loud. Zhinu turned back to look at her curiously. Regina brought her horse forward so they were side by side. “So tell me princess, what sort of man could be so awful that your mother would banish him from the palace?”

“He’s mortal.”

“Ah.”

“As are our children.”

The Queen Mother of the West had forced her daughter to be a dead beat mother. There was something delightfully **gauche** about that.

“And now you’re racing off to play house? How quaint.”

“My mother saw how much we cared for one another. She allows us one meeting every seven years.”

“Feel the urge to visit them a little early then?”

“No, I feel the need to **be** with them without my mother’s rules. The barrier between the Enchanted Forest and the Middle Kingdom is weak now. We’re going to escape to there.”

And deal with all manners of nasties that had arisen since Regina emptied the land. She bristled at the thought of this idealistic fool and her family reclaiming what had once been Regina’s.

“That forest hasn’t been touched in twenty-eight years. The only thing the curse left was the nastiest monsters imaginable. Hardly a place to escape to.”

The girl smiled serenely, “When you have love that is all you need.”

She sounded just like Snow White. So passionate and **sure**. Regina rolled her eyes, “I’m sure that love will be a great help protecting you from ogres and Jack Bluebeard. There is nothing in that land but ash.”

“And yet you seek it out.” There was a sudden sharpness in her tone. A slyness in her gaze. Regina was reminded of the girl’s mother and the eery guardian of her orchard.

“I have my reasons,” she said haughtily. 

The girl reached out, her hand warm on Regina’s arm, “I appreciate your concern for me Thief. My family and I survived my mother’s wrath. A land ravaged by curse can hardly compare.”

She wasn’t sure which was more likely to burst a blood vessel in rage. Calling her “Thief” like that was the sum of her, saying the Queen Mother’s magic was more potent than Regina’s curse, or mistaking Regina’s words for **concern**.

“If you want to traipse into a land full of death and destruction and try to raise a family there than by all means, dear, do so. I’ll just have my reward before you go.”

“And when my family and I are across the border you shall have it.” She patted the little purse gently, careful not to bruise its precious contents.

Regina had spent half their journey thinking about that peach and her plans for it. Short of a curse it was the closest to immortality she’d likely ever come. The last three decades had removed the bloom of that particular rose, but Regina was a survivor. She didn’t give up. She never backed down. Even though she knew immortality was hardly the most alluring prospect having **that** kind of power was too great a temptation to ignore.

And part of her didn’t even want it for herself.

Despite everything that had happened the image of Henry pale and still in a bed never, ever left her. He’d nearly been a casualty in her war. With the peach he’d be beyond it all. He could live a thousand perfect years untouched by poisonous apples or a mother’s spite or the suffocating presence of Emma Swan. With the Peach of Immortality Regina could confer on her son what no spell could, godhood.

She pushed her horse into a canter. Behind her Zhinu did the same, though she was shaky, her hands grasping at the pommel of her saddle to keep herself steady. Regina slowed to come along side her again and tapped lightly on her thighs, giving her briefly the gift of balance she clearly didn’t posses sans magic. 

“Come along dear,” she said, her voice curling around the girl like one of her spells, “I’ve got lovers to reunite.”

 

####

Before she dropped out Emma had had this one friend. This girl who always wore a spiked choker she’d picked up from Hot Topic and burgundy lipstick way too dark for her complexion. She was “edgy,” which was really just high school code for “smokes pot behind the gym and knows who Kurt Cobain is.” And that crazy bitch was totally, head over heels, obsessed with serial killers. She’d spend all of class just **drawing** them in class and she always had books out from the library full of the creeps.

“They know something we don’t,” she’d tell Emma.

“Yeah, how to kill people with a grapefruit spoon.”

When she became a bounty hunter she had, on two occasions, chanced upon a real life serial killer. That girl would have been so disappointed, because real serial killers weren’t these guys in their vans cutting up ladies and making suits out of them or misunderstood geniuses. The ones she found were more just murderers. Maybe not even “serial” killers by some stupid and arbitrary psych definition.

They were always guys who went a little crazy and killed their friends or their families. Just left bodies littering the floor and they’d be standing there acting like they hadn’t done it. She didn’t know how these guys got bail or why anyone could look at them and see anything but a psychopath. All she needed was one glance at some (maybe illegally acquired) crime scene photos and she could just **see** the crazy. It leaked off the page.

But she’d never seen it in real life until they came upon the slaughter at Lancelot’s refuge.

It wasn’t the result of a war. It wasn’t even a tragedy. It was one person’s wanton destruction. A hundred lay where they fell, gaping red holes where hearts had once resided.

“Cora,” her mother whispered. 

Like it was normal. Like it was almost **sane** to just assume one person could kill so many so effortlessly and **like** it. Because you didn’t kill that many people and hate it. It was impossible to hate when there was **that** much blood on your hands.

“Cora did this?” She had to ask because she couldn’t quite believe someone she’d actually spoken to could have performed such an atrocity.

“I told you,” Mary Margaret said, toeing aside a body and closing her eyes at the sight of a dead child beneath, “she’s a monster.”

“Monster makes her sound like a fairytale Mary Margaret. This is…” Jeffrey Dahmer might have even been nauseous at the carnage. And Mary Margaret and the other two just walked among the bodies like it was **normal**.

“It’s evil,” Mary Margaret said. “Cora is evil.” In their silence Mulan and Aurora agreed. They accepted a single descriptor as explanation for the massacre they were staring at. “Evil.” Like it explained every little thing about a woman Emma only knew as Cora, her son’s grandmother.

“If this is what Cora does than what about Regina? You guys call her the Evil **Queen**.”

For a second something like regret flickered in Mary Margaret’s eyes. Emma was reminded of Henry’s storybook and all the tales that couldn’t be told in it. All those that **weren’t**. If Cora was just an evil woman and Regina was, like, titular, than how awful were her atrocities? What had she left her son to fight?

“Regina’s different. She’s…she’s mad—insane, but she’s also obsessed and just with me. She’d never do something like this.”

“Unless they were all dwarves and David right?”

“Henry’s safer with her than Cora. In fact being with her is probably the safest place he **can** be right now.”

“Until she decides to be like Mom and go ripping out a few hearts. Mary Margaret we have to get back. We have to stop her before—“

“We have to stop Cora first.” Mulan’s voice was strong despite the tears watering her eyes. “This **thing** has to be stopped.” She sank the blade of her sword into the ground and knelt next to it, leaning into the blade and trying not to cry.

There was always this war in Emma between the easy way and the hard way. The easy way, the selfish way, was to agree to Mulan’s face but get away as soon as possible. The hard way, though, that was the right way and it would be agonizing and she might…she might not even survive it.

The glassy dead eyes of a kid not much younger than Henry stared up at a sun they could not see. That kid died because Cora Mills somehow survived. She’d survived the curse and her daughter and everything since. She’d murdered over a hundred people to just show Emma and Snow that she was powerful and terrifying.

There was the easy way, but the right way was so damned necessary Emma couldn’t ignore it.

“So we kill her first?”

Mary Margaret bowed her head. One hand was on that now ever present bow and her knuckles turned white as she gripped it tightly. “We stop Cora and make sure she **never** gets to Henry, and then we go home.” And never come back here. That was the promise implicit in Mary Margaret’s tone.

Having had her share of magic and outdoor plumbing and prison pits Emma was happy to quietly agree. “So how do we stop a super evil witch than can beat us here in time to massacre a village? Because last time I got the feeling she **let** us walk away.”

“She may need us, or you Emma. With the wardrobe gone you could be the most powerful magic left.”

And that was just— “Great. So she’s going to run around toying with us?”

Aurora had taken the opportunity to start rearranging the bodies, pulling them to lay flat and crossing their arms over their torsos. It was probably way more civilized than plotting murder and it had kept her quiet that whole time. Emma had just sort of assumed she was too wrapped up in all the corpses to even pay attention. But she was thoughtful—careful—as she spoke. “Or perhaps she was waiting to add our bodies to the pile and something interrupted her.”

 

####

The Queen Mother’s horses were preternaturally quick. Capable of cutting a journey of a week at a trot on a normal horse down to merely a day at a canter. The wind whipped at their hair and clothes as they rode. The cool air was biting against the steel grey coat and coordinated pants Regina had chosen for her journey.

Her only comfort, in fact, was that miserable locket around her neck. It was warm, reminding her of Henry when he was young and would curl up against her chest and follow along as she read him a story. Her thoughts returned to Henry often.

For a year she’d been losing her son. Watching as he moved further and further away. As his love slipped between her fingers the tighter she grasped it. It irked her that she had to cling so tightly to this opportunity Henry had presented her with.

He’d given her the chance, as infinitesimal as it was, to redeem herself in his eyes. To save his birth mother and finally, after four decades of villainy, become a hero.

She didn’t actually want to be a hero. Heroes were dull, weak and far too reliant on external forces. Every one she’d met needed at least one deus ex machina on their road to victory. Regina much preferred manufacturing her own destiny.

Besides, she’d played the hero before and wound up losing a lover and gaining a family she had no love for. Heroism had, in her experience, never been worth it. But it was what Henry now demanded of her. “Bring her back,” he had pleaded.

Like all acts of heroism Regina’s had quickly snowballed. Ideally she should have popped into existence standing right next to Emma and her mother. Instead she’d found herself on the other side of the world in a place full of magic as powerful as her own and being watched by a suspicious goddess. And now she was helping that goddess’s daughter reunite with her true love when really she wanted to fling the girl off her horse, take the beast by the reigns, and make a break for the Enchanted Forest all alone.

They crested what must have been the hundredth hill they’d climbed in the last hour and Zhinu sighed in happiness. Her pale finger jabbed out into the darkness that had fallen in the last hour to where there was a barely visible glow of orange firelight in the distance.

A river had cut a deep canyon between the hill they were on and the hill the light glowed from. She could only hear the violent rushing of water along the stone walls.

“There,” Zhinu breathed, “my beloved’s home.”

Regina searched the sides of the canyon before sighing in annoyance. “And there,” she said almost lazily, “a hundred of your mother’s guards at the only bridge.”

The bridge glowed gold with the Queen Mother’s magic. It seemed, even from a distance, to actually be made of the stuff. There was no stone or wood in its makeup. Only the shimmer of a goddess’s will.

“One of them will be carrying a talisman of my mother’s design. It allows whomever holds it to cross the bridge.”

“Is there a particular reason we didn’t take it with us when we left?”

“My mother wears it at all times. You might be somewhat clever Thief but I didn’t want to risk what skills you may or may not possess on it.”

She rested her hands on the pommel of her saddle. “Well then, your highness, is there a plan for crossing that bridge?”

The girl smiled nastily, “You created a curse out of your own hatred, and stole a princess away from her palace. Surely a talisman plucked from a guard’s waist is a trifle.”

Regina blinked, “I’m sorry. What?”

Zhinu stuck her with a knowing glare, “I know who you are. The Evil Queen.”

“I thought I was a thief.”

“You stole the life and happiness of everyone in your land. You meant to steal my mothers peaches. How are you not a thief?”

She would have pointed out that she hadn’t **planned** to steal the peaches until she’d stepped into the orchard and realized she wanted one. Yet Thief was far preferable to Evil Queen, which always seemed to be accompanied by a sneer.

“And now, what, you want me to go down there and steal the talisman? What’s to stop your mother from appearing in a puff of smoke and kicking me off that bridge as soon as I’m down there?”

“My mother’s magic protects our realm from the curse and keeps others from passing into it. It also keeps her from traveling it in a thought. If you are quick and quiet you will have the talisman before she even awakens at the palace.”

Regina pursed her mouth in disgust but still dismounted, tossing the reigns to Zhinu and hanging her satchel over the horse’s pommel. “I’ll be back,” she promised.

It had gotten easier since they escaped the night before. To the point that Regina had only to think it and she was shrinking down, clothes and all, to the size and shape of a cat. It allowed her to move briskly through the brush and still cover ground quickly. When she came closer to the platoon of men and women on horseback she grew smaller. To the form of a rat.

And was imminently grateful that Miss Swan wasn’t there to see it. She’d have some tacky bon mot to unload at the sight, and she’d probably grin while she said it, elbowing her mother to agree while Snow watched in some fusion of pain and constipation. 

Running on four legs was an adjustment. As was everything about being a rat. Everything was taller, like she was a little person in one of Henry’s video games, and the colors were all off. Her sense of smell was better. That would have been wonderful, but she was dodging horse droppings and the dirty feet of the Queen Mother’s guards. Had she a human nose at that moment it would have wrinkled in distaste.

Slipping behind some pack horses she reverted back to her human form and crouched between the beasts’ legs. Her gaze wandered over each soldier in search of the one with the Queen Mother’s talisman. It should have been vibrant even in the dark, shining with her power and casting light over the entire bridge.

“Hello?”

Oh they had to be kidding her.

“Who’s there?”

Every single soldier on the bridge twisted in their saddles to look towards the opposite end, where Zhinu’s idiotic lover should have been tucked into his bed. But no. Lovers and heroes were all, as previously established, mortally stupid and there stood, whom Regina had to presume was, Zhinu’s lover. He was dressed like a farmer with a cloak covering most of him and a cheap lamp held aloft to light his way.

“Zhinu,” he called.

Regina hoped that that girl had stayed up on the hill and hadn’t ridden down closer to— “Niulang!”

Regina was cursed. Doomed to forever be stuck dealing with terrifyingly witless fools who couldn’t stay on a hill watching the horses like Regina’s had so clearly implied with a look.

The platoon of soldiers mustered in an instant, because naturally they were well trained, and one called out to Zhinu, who had at least been smart enough to stay **relatively** hidden.

On the other end of the bridge Niulang was peering into the darkness and calling for his wife in a more panicked state. Which just made Zhinu more panicked. Which just made the soldiers’ jobs easier.

Which actually made Regina’s job easier too. The one calling out to Zhinu was clearly the leader and she seemed to glow brighter than her fellow soldiers. Like…like she carried the talisman. Regina called down the densest fog she could muster in the short amount of time, and with all the panicked lovers screeching and the guards’ general nerves about being on a bridge made of nothing but magic it created a delicious sort of chaos that she moved through effortlessly.

The guard with the talisman tensed her thigh as she prepared to spur her horse into a gallop but Regina was faster, gripping the woman’s leg in a vice like grip and yanking her down from her horse into the fog. The woman opened her mouth to protest but Regina leaned over her. “Sleep,” she crooned, and the woman’s eyes drifted shut so peacefully that even a non-believer would have known magic was at work.

She snatched the talisman, another stupid silk purse, from the woman’s belt and held it aloft. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she called politely.

In the ruckus no one heard her.

“Listen,” she said more firmly. Her voice was fueled by all the magic in her. Shooting out of her mouth and bouncing off the canyon walls and into the ears of every creature within ten miles. The soldiers all slowly turned to watch her warily.

“Good,” she said, finding her way to the Evil Queen’s confidence simply enough, “Now in my hand you’ll note I have a talisman and with it I can eradicate this bridge with a thought.” The soldiers all tensed to attack. “And you’ll also note that I have magic and most of you do not. So before you consider this a bluff and blindly attack me know that I’d quite like to watch you all plummet to your death while I continue to stand here unaffected.”

That did it. Halbreds and spears sagged. A few horses took a step back.

“Good. As you’re aware you’ve been **routed**. I’ve won. So you may now ride off this bridge and into the hills, which may be the only safe place for you when the Queen Mother hears of your failure.”

A good woman wouldn’t remind them of how awfully they’d failed. It simply wasn’t polite to pour salt in the wound.

She shooed them away, “Quickly. Hurry along. I promise you whatever punishment she’ll plan want be nearly as bad as this fall.” She waved the talisman down towards the river far. Far. Below.

It looked, at least for a moment, like the soldiers were actually going to leave. They turned their horses away and their shoulders dropped in defeat. It was quite picturesque.

But among every platoon of soldiers there was always that **one** hero. That one person who thought they knew what was better than all their peers. He spun his horse around and spurred it forward with a powerful shout. She watched him idly, noting his excellent form and the righteous fury alight in his eyes. She could see the tale he would tell his children, of how he alone vanquished the Evil Queen and stole victory from her grasp.

It was so…adorable.

“Oops,” she said coyly, delighting in the way his face fell as he realized he shouldn’t have called her bluff. The entire bridge disappeared in a second. There was no flash or woosh of air. There was a bridge made of magic. Then there was not.

 

####

Emma burped. Not that unusual. If she drank a lot of beer or soda she was going to burp. Burping was a perfectly natural function.

But not really in front of a princess while you two were digging a mass grave in the dead of night. After building a small camp her mother and Mulan had elected themselves “foragers” and were gathering whatever supplies they could use on their “quest,” because God help them they were on a legitimate “quest.” Like knights.

“Henry would love this,” she grunted. Her shovel struck a rock and she had to pry it out carefully before picking it up and tossing it over the edge.

Aurora was “framing” the grave. That’s what she’d said too. She’d picked up her shovel and started drawing an outline in the dirt with it and when Emma had looked at her like she was coco crazy she’d said, “I’m framing it.” Whatever the hell that meant.

She paused her stupid project to look at Emma like **she** was the crazy one. “Your son enjoys digging mass graves?”

“What? No! I mean all of us on a quest to kill an evil witch.”

“Witches are easier to stop than kill.”

“Don’t we just dunk ‘em in cold water and call it a day?”

“If you want to make them wet then yes? But most of us condemn them in a tower or banish them from the—“

A monster of a burp ripped through Emma, interrupting Aurora’s lecture and startling them both. “Sorry.” She wasn’t that sorry. Burping was a perfectly natural bodily function and technically they were both princesses, so it wasn’t like she was some commoner goof—

“You seem to be belching quite a bit.”

She rubbed again at her chest, “Yeah it just came up on me. Like I’ve got all this excess air in me. Usually it’s from chugging a beer though.”

“We should tell Snow White. She’ll want to know.”

Emma rolled her eyes, “She’ll just think it’s something to do with whatever weird magic thing is happening. I don’t need to worry her.”

“But—“

“Look, my…mom is kind of dealing with the guilt of not being there for twenty-eight years and I’d kind of like to help avoid adding to that guilt if I can. Okay?”

Really Emma was still having a hell of a time just reconciling the roommate/friend with her **mom**. But little things, like keeping Mary Margaret from looking concerned? That was stuff Emma could handle and that was a good start. Focus on the small stuff and build from there.

“Our own veritable Dr. Spock,” she heard Regina crow smugly, “teaching us all how to integrate.”

Her shovel hit another rock. The vibrations shocking their way up her hands and straight to her shoulders. The shovel slipped from her grasp. 

Why had she just thought of how Regina would comment on the situation?

“I’ve no idea Sheriff Swan, it’s **your** brain after all.”

She called out to Aurora, “Hey are you hearing something?”

“No dear, I’m afraid it’s all in your head,” so close she could feel damp breath on her ear. For a moment she could actually **see** Regina in the grave with her. There just in the corner of her eye. Dressed like she was about to go for a prissy ride on a horse. She was smiling. “Breathe dear.”

“What…how?”

Aurora stopped digging. “Emma?”

“How are you in my head?”

“I’m not what you should be worried about.”

Aurora stuck her shovel in the dirt and crept down the side of the grave, skidding to a stop right where Regina had stood. “Emma, what’s the matter?” She reached for Emma’s arm. “You’re talking to someone who is—“

“Listen Sheriff,” the fake Regina said urgently. That sensation that had been there before, the gross pee thing, it wasn’t pee. It was a hand on her chest. A ghost hand thingy. Regina was right there with her hand on her chest. “Listen.”

“I don’t—“

“Then feel.” The hand dug into her chest and Emma’s mouth dropped open in anticipation of pain, but there was only the warmth spreading through her and a sense of unease on the fringe of her consciousness. 

Aurora tugged on her again drawing her away from the ghost in front of her. “What’s happened?”

“Regina. I was seeing weird Obi-Wan Regina and she was telling me to listen, and then everything just kind of opened,” she would have said like a flower but that sent her to vagina places, “and now I can feel something…bad. Something bad coming for us.”

There was a snort at the edge of the pit and what sounded like a horse pawing the ground. Both women turned and it had to be a big moment because for Emma it felt like slow motion. Like holding the watches and seeing that cop or opening the door and finding Henry on the other side.

A giant loomed over them. A hairy giant man who seemed to merge with a horse. 

A centaur.

A centaur was staring down at them smiling in what could only be described as a “super frickin’ evil” way.

His deep voice boomed in the darkness, “Something bad found you.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your warm responses! Reviews will be met with an “aw” and me working to write more.

Well.

That was unexpected.

Regina’s plan had been to wipe away the bridge and send the whole platoon of soldiers to their death. Saving but a few so she wouldn’t appear **completely** monstrous. She’d called the vines clinging to the canyon walls to her aid and instead of snaking out of the stone and grasping the limbs of a few soldiers and their horses the vines shot out forming a web and snatching up nearly every single creature that had been on the bridge.

A confused silence hung heavy in the air before the soldiers and their horses thrashed in their bindings and cried out in alarm.

Which only made it worse. Regina had to hold her hand out and curl it into a fist to properly tighten the vines around all of her captives. If she kept them too loose a horse would break its neck or a soldier would slip through and plummet to their death, but too tight and they’d all probably kill themselves trying to get out.

“Struggling only makes it worse,” she noted in a sing song voice. “Relax or you’ll ending up killing yourselves.”

That helped a little. Not much though. Floating in mid-air over them with only the purple glow of magic around her feet probably didn’t help either. She reactivated the talisman and the golden bridge re-materialized. 

Zhinu wasted no time rushing across the space trailing Regina’s horse behind her. “Did you—“

“Oh they’re fine.” She waved down at the gnarled tangle of branches horses and soldiers. “Your mother will be able to free them. Or,” she peered over the side, “just let them drop. How upset does she get about failure?”

Zhinu didn’t quite know how to respond to that.

“No matter. I thought it was implied that you would stay up on the hill.”

But Zhinu wasn’t paying attention. Lovers never did. They were easily distracted. Like dogs. Or small children.

“Niulang,” the girl whispered. She dismounted sloppily and fell on the bridge, her horse’s reigns forgotten.

“Zhinu.”

Oh for heaven’s—

The ruddy farmer was tip toeing cross the bridge. Inching towards them in complete shock. The little princess smiled, but her steps towards him were halting. As though she couldn’t believe her lover was there.

And judging by the way he just stood there ineptly he was having the same problem. If his mouth stayed open like that any longer some fly was going to zip right in and take up residence.

Regina was about to tell them to move it along so she wouldn’t be stuck on the bridge all night when they both suddenly darted forward with arms outstretched.

She turned away from the embrace. Reunited lovers made her nauseous. Didn’t matter if she liked or despised them, just watching them hug and **feeling** that joy emanate from them was enough to turn her stomach.

“How,” he murmured into her hair.

“I had too,” she murmured back into his neck.

Regina tried to focus more on the baleful cries of the men and women trapped below her. It was far more pleasant. Something like music to her ears. She’d forgotten how good fear sounded having abstained from magic and general villainy for thirty years.

Humming thoughtfully to herself she took up the reigns of both horses and passed the still cuddling husband and wife. She then found herself fighting the compulsion to disappear the bridge again when she made it to the other side and saw that Zhinu and her farmer were still standing in the middle canoodling likes kids from Storybrooke high school.

“As touching as this all is,” she shouted across the space, “I just performed a bit of magic that is sure to have alerted your mother.” They parted and stared at her in confusion. “She’s probably on her way,” she elaborated.

That sunk into their love riddled brains. They took each other by the hand and ran across the bridge where Zhinu raised their clasped hands and said breathlessly, “This is my husband Niulang. And this is the woman who rescued me.”

“I escorted you out of the palace and disappeared a bridge. That’s hardly heroic.”

“She survived lying to the Queen Mother and Monkey King, then she stole me away and used her magic to hide us from my mother through the entire journey, and she vanquished an army with a thought just to protect you and I.”

Well, when she narrated the events that way Regina did sound— “And I did it for a price if you’ll recall.”

Zhinu agreed with that at least. “Yes. You did.” She pulled the purse containing the peach from where it had been tucked into the fabric at her waist. “Though I hardly think a single fruit can have so much value.”

And yet an apple had been worth children's lives and her last shred of Daniel. She plucked the purse from Zhinu’s grasp and set it gently in the top of her bag. Those were dangerous thoughts for other days. Ones where she still didn’t have a long ride to the Enchanted Forest ahead of her.

She tried to make her goodbyes, which was really just a curt nod, but Niulang begged her to stay. “Just for dinner,” he said. “We owe you a debt so let us at least feed you.”

“Shouldn’t you be fleeing from your mother?”

Apparently the children and Niulang would need time to pack. The most powerful woman in the realm was likely furious and headed straight for them and the family needed to serve her a (delicious) meal and pack.

Regina stayed anyways. She **was** hungry and sitting in a proper chair after a day on horseback was a relief. After they’d eaten a feast of tofu and colorful vegetables and bright tasting sauces and she’d watched them all glow with love and affection for one another she started to leave again, but Niulang begged her to stay. “Please,” he said, “if what my wife says is true we’re all making the journey to the Enchanted Forest together. We’re stronger that way if we’re found.”

He was so earnest.

“Yes,” Zhinu said, and once again the flighty lover disappeared so the clever daughter of a god could peek out, “do stay. Just for the night.” Her gentle smile was like a viper’s. “Rest.”

Regina had been traveling non-stop since her arrival in the Middle Kingdom. A few moments of sleep on horseback had been her only relief from the serial drudgery of being awake. She was exhausted and running on nothing but a desire to see Henry and a worrying tremor of magic that seemed to be constantly flowing into her. She tried not to think about the source of the magic because she had no idea where it was coming from, but something so bright and effervescent couldn’t be entirely bad right?

Nevertheless her eyes narrowed at Zhinu’s smile. She’d been a frustrating jumble of cleverness and naiveté their entire journey. Regina was never certain what the girl was going to say next. Compound that with that smile, and her being the daughter of a very ruthless. It was entirely too suspicious a move for her liking.

Regina’s fist snapped out, crunching against the woman’s nose in a glorious spurt of red. The violence was like fire up her entire arm reminding her instantly of her spare encounters with it over the decades. They’d been few and they’d nearly all been when dealing with the grating Miss Swan.

Niulang rushed forward but with a flick of Regina’s wrist he was flying back—slamming into the wall of his hovel and sending up a cloud of dust upon impact. The two little children screamed and with a glare they too were against the wall, bound with roots sprung from the wood. She did the same to Niulang before he could right himself then came to tower over Zhinu.

She was kneeling on the floor staring at the garish red covering her hands and leaking from her nose. “I don’t—“ 

Regina didn’t wait for her to finish. She lifted the woman up with magic. “You don’t what? Understand? Oh I think you do.”

One of the chairs at the dining table unfolded itself and crawled across the room. Zhinu came to rest in it gently, and the pillows unthreaded themselves to form silk ropes that bound her tightly to it.

“You were planning to leave me. You’d sneak off with your husband and children and leave me to face your mother’s wrath.”

The girl opened her mouth to protest and more silk slithered out to cover it.

“Silence. I’m talking **dear**.” And even the children grew quiet. Regina took a deep breath. It’d been so long since she’d felt quite this…powerful. Perhaps even before the curse. That bright light of magic had left her momentarily and there was only the inky fingers of her own magic wounding their way through her veins. She exhaled and stepped closer.

“You see I think you think me some sort of fool because I lied to your mother and that monkey. In the world I come from they call it a ‘patsy?’ You meant to make me your scapegoat, and with my lies, our escape and the peach in my satchel your mother would have been only too happy to skin me alive over the course of a century.” 

She leaned. Perspiration dotted the girl’s face, her gag was already soaking with blood from her fractured nose, and her eyes were wild with fear and loss. It smelled…heavenly. “Now you can deal with her.” Every word was a promise that move torturously across the girl’s face.

She straightened herself and slung her bag across her chest.

Before she was to the door Zhinu had worked the gag free and cried out, “I wasn’t going to betray you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “You’re evil and twisted so you think the rest of the world is too. But I’m not. I only wanted your help.”

“You’ve had it.”

The girl screeched in frustration, “Then what happens to me will be on your head!”

Regina shrugged. “Hardly the worst thing to be there.”

 

####

Emma was a pretty worldly gal. Multiple foster families, teen pregnancy and prison tended to do that to a woman. The bounty hunter thing helped too. She’d seen enough crazy things in the world that it just sort of rolled off of her. Like she was teflon. As long as people weren’t also attaching the crazy to some stupid prophecy that said she was a savior she could handle it.

Which is how she hadn’t curled up in a ball when offered chimera or when she saw her son’s grandma send his other grandmother into the wall with magic. Even the ogre and dragon had been terrifying but…doable. When your family tells you they don’t need you anymore at the ripe old age of three and sends you back into the system you get pretty good and being adaptable.

So Emma didn’t scream. 

Okay. No, she screamed. She screamed like a chick in a slasher film. Full on waaaahgahahhhaaaaa kind of screaming that probably woke every corpse she and Aurora had been digging a grave for. It was A+ kind of screaming which all the sexist and stupid fairytales told her she needed to be at least a little good at what with being a princess.

And then the centaur, being ENORMOUS, stepped into the grave, which from his vantage point was probably more like a gentle dip in the ground. His hand, as big as Emma’s whole head, wrapped around her skull and then he just flung her. The last thing she saw before she was waking up again was a whole lot of freshly turned dirt coming at her face.

When she **did** wake up that dirt was in her mouth and she was slung over the back of horse like a sack of potatoes and staring at the ground racing underfoot and getting ridiculously nauseous from it all.

Wait. Not a horse.

How the hell did the centaur tie her to his back? **And** Aurora too? And where were Mary Margaret and Mulan the wonder warriors? Did they just flee at the sight of Gigantor? Because it had to have taken him a while to intricately tie up their hands and ankles and then lash them to his back. That was not a thirty-second job. They would have had plenty of time to shoot at him with their dinky bows and arrows and then hack at him with swords. 

Only reason she and Aurora didn’t do that was because she was hallucinating Regina and Aurora was…well she was a princess and ignored the extra clothes in the abandoned town so she could walk around in some old drapes. They were not your go to centaur slayers. But Mary Margaret killed an ogre with **one** arrow and Mulan stopped Genghis Khan with an avalanche.

Okay that was actually a movie and not real life. But seeing as she existed in this fairytale land and ran around batting fireballs with a sword and looking surly she had to be at least kind of badass right? Enough to kill one simple centaur.

Laughter distracted her from her confusion and if she twisted her neck into a decidedly uncomfortable position and sort of squinted she saw Regina keeping pace with the centaur on a very regal looking brown horse. She was still wearing the riding get up which meant Regina **hadn’t** come through the magic hat to rescue them for the insanity but was instead a weird figment of Emma’s imagination.

And damn it why the hell was she laughing anyways?

“This isn’t funny.”

“My dear you look like a trussed up pork for a luau. From my perspective this is very funny.”

Emma wriggled around but that only made the nausea thing worse.

“Careful dear. He still thinks you’re sleeping. He likely will want you awake for the raping and maiming so giving yourself time by pretending to sleep would be prudent.”

“Why is it always raping and maiming?”

She looked at Emma like Emma was the stupid one. “He’s a centaur. That’s what they’re known for.”

“I thought they taught heroes how to fight and stuff.”

“That was a special one. Most of them just rape and maim. Sometimes for a price, and seeing as centaurs haven’t been seen in a few centuries he was probably woken up and launched at you by someone in this world who wants you dead.”

“Uh huh. What the hell are you?”

Regina’s horse faltered before she reined it in to keep apace. “I beg your pardon.”

“I’m a pretty smart lady Regina. I pick up on a lot of things, but I’m positive even my subconscious doesn’t know everything you’re saying.”

“I’m here to help.”

“Huh,” she looked skyward, which was painful in her current condition, “why don’t I trust that.”

“Perhaps because you’re a foster child with massive trust issues.”

“Says the daughter of Mommie Dearest. Glass houses Regina.”

Regina leaned over in her saddle and sneered, “I can always leave you to staring at a horse’s ass while Sleeping Beauty there naps and your hirsute friend plots ways to murder you.”

“You’re a figment of my imagination. How the hell are you supposed to help?”

Regina was even closer now. For an imaginary version of a long time nemesis she was a damn good horse…lady. Horse woman? Horsewoman? Whatever. She was decent at it and the horse ran straight. “You could sense him before he attacked yes?”

She’d felt unsettled. “Maybe?”

“That’s magic Emma.”

“Okay…” So everyone in the Enchanted Forest had magical powers? **That** wasn’t in Henry’s book.

“So it means you can probably do other things. Like get out of your bindings.”

“We’re riding at like forty miles per hour Regina. I get loose I could break my neck. And besides I can’t leave Aurora behind.”

The imaginary mayor actually had the nerve to roll her eyes! “Fine. Don’t use all the magic just brimming inside.” She veered away into the darkness. There one second and gone the next.

Beside her Aurora groaned and her eyes fluttered open.

“Wha—“

“We’ve been kidnapped by a centaur.”

“Mulan?”

“No clue.

Aurora’s eyes closed again. “Wake me when we get to the part where he gloats and threatens to kill us.”

“Shouldn’t we maybe try to escape?”

Aurora shifted a little, “Have you ever tried to outrun a centaur?”

“Okay, but I’m not just going to—“

The centaur reared up. Emma lurched forward and slammed into Aurora. 

“We’re here girls,” the beast—man—man beast growled.

Both women tried to twist in their bindings to see where “here” was. “Is that a cave—“

“Full of centaurs,” Aurora confirmed.

And it looked like they were drunk.

 

####

She tied one horse to the other, pointed them towards the Enchanted Forest and she rode. Sometimes at a gallop and sometimes at a trot. She drifted off at one point while it was still dark and had a dream she was talking to Emma Swan and the other woman was trussed up like a pork roast. Then she woke herself up and put her heel to her horse’s flank and didn’t let up until dawn came and both horses’ snouts were flecked white with spittle and sweat soaked their fur.

It was faster than she’d ever ridden on a horse and her hair turned wild as the wind whipped at it. It would have been better to pull it back in a tight braid, but she’d sworn them off when coming to the new land. So she contented herself with windblown hair that would need a good brushing at some point.

Her body, even fueled by magic, couldn’t escape the aches of being in saddle for so long after being foot-bound for three decades. As the sun burst like fire over the horizon she took the horses off the road and followed her intuition to a stream where she watered both beasts and tried to walk around without grumbling in pain.

The air no longer shimmered gold and the smell of cinders had grown more pronounced. She had, at some point in the last hour, finally crossed into the Enchanted Forest. She’d been on well paved mountain paths for most of her flight but had finally made her descent into the treeline when the sky was pale in anticipation of dawn.

But the forest had still been gold then.  Which was odd. She’d expected some sort of barrier, magical or physical, between the Middle Kingdom and Enchanted Forest. Though connected they were entirely different lands and one was protected by a goddess. There should have been a sense of pressure or the magic should have dissipated in a shimmer of gold. Instead she’d simply passed from one land to the next.

Her hand moved involuntarily to the locket of Henry’s hair. It was its doing. It had to be. That incandescent and pure magic that kept rising up to supply her when she was her most weary came straight from the locket. From Henry.

Regina fought the smile. Henry had magic. Powerful magic. That had to be… somehow it was all in that lock of hair and giving her the strength to complete the quest he’d given her.

She pulled it free from her shirt and brought it to her lips, offering a silent thanks to the son who must love her. Magic such as his couldn’t be formed from anything else.

Twigs snapping in the forest brought her back to her current state, weary, hungry and watching two magic horses drink half a stream of water. Her own magic bristled on her skin. She was out in the open and weak. If something was out there watching her…she readied her magic. Called it to her like a master to an errant dog.

“If you’re going to hide in the forest I’ll just burn it down around you,” she warned. Her voice was powerful and oily like that Evil Queen of old. 

But only silence met her challenge.

A ball of pure fire formed in her hand. Not hot. Not yet. As soon as it left her finger tips it’d burn hot enough to melt iron at a touch, but now it was nothing more than a caress.

Another twig cracked and she snarled as the fire leapt from her fingers, scorching a path through the trees and reducing it all to ashes. There was nothing left behind—though there was nothing there to begin with. Just nature, trying to reclaim a land that had burned and died with the roiling fog of the curse.

One of the horse, Hwin, whinnied at the smell of the charred forest. 

“You’ll be fine,” she told the mare, but the horse’s eyes weren’t quite so trusting at it remained in the stream, content to study her from afar.

The other one, she’d started calling him Gauvin, plodded up to her. The fire reflected orange in his dark eyes and with his dark brown coat and unbrushed black mane he looked demonic.

“But you’re all right with the fire aren’t you?”

Being a horse, even a magical horse from the Queen Mother of the West’s stable, he didn’t respond. Just nipped at her shoulder in an ornery fashion. It should have bothered her. But she’d chosen him, one of only two stallions in the stable. She liked that he seemed ornry and the other horses had shied away and she liked that he was big and fierce. He reminded her of her lost Rocinante. Though he’d been better tempered then this Gauvin.

Hwin, whom she’d named after that ridiculous book she’d once tried to read to Henry, finally approached when she saw that more fireballs weren’t spurting from Regina’s hands.

She was gentler, and with her blond coat and pale mane she seemed, in many ways, Gauvin’s opposite.

“I suppose you’re good natured, always mindful and especially kind,” she joked.

Hwin stomped the ground in protest earning a laugh from Regina.

Oh good Lord she was talking to horses.

She mounted Gauvin again, the saddle biting into all the little aches she’d accumulated from nearly two days in the saddle. And now she had another day of riding to go.

It should have made her miserable, but with Henry’s love burning brightly on her breast, two good strong horses and her growing affinity to magic she’d dearly missed it didn’t smart quite so much.

She clicked her tongue and both horses fell into step, Hwin moving smoothly to follow directly behind Gauvin. Maybe she’d bring them back with her. Breed magic horses. Teach Henry how to ride. On the backs of these horses they’d blaze through town in a matter of minutes, and they could race along the beach. She’d teach him how to put on a saddle (and not the cumbersome thing currently on both horses) and mount without a block and how to ride a trot and how to post. Maybe after years of practice she’d show him how to jump and when she got Gauvin and Hwin breeding she’d teach him how to break the horses’ brood. They’d come home every day smelling like hay and manure and sweat and their legs would ache and there’s be dirt beneath their fingernails.

It’d be perfect. She’d might even invite Ms. Swan if she wasn’t being particularly onerous. But largely so she could see her fall off the horses. She strongly suspected Emma would be terrible at riding horseback. Like her mother. Her father…well Regina seemed to remember him not being **awful**.

She tugged on the rein bringing both horses to a halt. When had she considered inviting Emma? Or thinking of her as Emma? And why on earth would she bring these beasts back with her? Henry didn’t need to ride. He needed to focus on school and he needed to go to college and he needed to be **safe** and horses never made anyone safe.

The locket seemed to beat against her chest. She fingered it lightly through her blouse. Something about the locket—about her connection to it and to Henry. It was doing things to her. Putting little cracks in Regina. Chipping away to grasp at something foreign and soft far beneath.

The sooner she found that woman and her idiot mother and escaped this land the better.

 

####

Emma still had no idea how the hell the centaur had tied both of them up and to his back because when they entered the cave filled with even more centaurs one helpfully untied them and then tossed them next to the fire like sacks of potatoes before returning to consuming giant vats of alcohol.

Having never been a fan of bondage the fact that she’d been tied up and tossed around **twice** in the last week was starting to grate on Emma. Also there was the whole being trampled on or raped or something by centaurs.

“Do centaurs rape,” she whispered to a very alarmed Aurora.

“Why on earth—“

“Like is that something we should be concerned with here?”

Aurora was scandalized but answered, “Whenever a lady is kidnapped she must always be concerned about,” she dropped her voice, “molestation.”

“Okay, that’s bullshit. I mean, maybe true but don’t you think its bullshit we even have to wonder? If Gold or David or had been kidnapped **they** wouldn’t be worried.”

“About what?”

Emma froze. It was like ice water in her veins. Not because the centaur was huge and growly. More because someone **that** big shouldn’t have been able to sneak up so quietly. She prided herself on her alertness in scary situations. Having a ton of horse man sneaking up on her was the opposite of alert.

Beside her Aurora grimaced and said nothing. Emma too tried to seal her lips, but it was a fucking **centaur**. Her mouth just sort of stayed open. “You’ll catch flies” that one foster mom crooned.

“Yes, dear,” Regina said, “you wouldn’t want that.” She was standing right next to horse man, her head just below where his bellybutton would have been if he were human. 

“Well,” he growled, his voice register so low Emma’s bones seemed to vibrate.

“We were just—“

“Quiet.”

She nodded amicably.

“Which one of you is the girl? The one from another land?”

“Me.”

“Oh dear,” Regina whispered, suddenly lying next to Emma. “Being forward? Trying to protect the princess? But what if you’re the one he wants and she’s the spare?”

“Shut up,” she said harshly.

The centaur’s front hoof was suddenly on Emma’s neck, the sharp edges of the shoe biting into her flesh. He didn’t apply enough pressure to break skin, but Emma still gasped to breath.

“What did you say?”

“He can’t see me remember,” Regina sounded almost…urgent. “I’m in your head.”

“Sorry,” she croaked, directing it to neither the beast on her neck or the witch in her head.

Regina accepted the apology first—probably because she was some deep down part of Emma or something. “Good. Good. I can help you, and Aurora too, but you have to not speak. Understand?”

The centaur was growling again but Emma’s eyes were stuck on Regina.

“Now centaurs haven’t been seen in hundreds of years. We boxed them all up in caves like this. They’re smart though. Smarter than you’d think what with their lack of clothing, manners, or decency. So be careful Emma.” Suddenly she was even closer. Imaginary breath brushed against Emma’s ear. “Can you feel it?” An imaginary hand on her chest. 

And Emma could feel…something. Dawn had broken beyond the cave and dull light leaked in drawing bleaker surroundings than she would have suspected for a group of centaur. She’d imagined fancy fabrics and gold, not something barely above caveman chic.

But in her chest there was a… trill—a trill of something.

“That’s magic dear. And powerful. You can feel it because of what you are.”

The centaur’s hoof dug deeper into her neck and Emma choked. “I said **listen** ,” he roared. The hoof raised, as though it might stomp down on her head and crush whatever brains hadn’t been rattled to goo by everything of the last week, but then it snapped to attention by the other hoof. 

He’d asked her a question judging by his glare, and she had no idea what it was. She looked to Aurora helplessly and the girl inhaled sharply, “No,” Aurora said begrudgingly, “I am not Snow White.”

“Then you are useless.”

Shit.

Shit. Emma had **no** idea what was going on. She rewound. Tried to look at the facts. But really all she knew was she was worth something and Aurora wasn’t and that was bad. 

“She’s a princess,” she shouted. “Rich, rich princess. Stuck in a palace sleeping for twenty-eight years because of a curse.”

The centaur turned and shouted something in a guttural language.

“Not what I would have said,” mused head Regina. “Centaurs are wild creatures. Base beasts. Clever, but lacking the more complicated desires of humanity.”

Okay so— “You like money right? It had to be good for…shoes? Or centaur stuff? She can help you. She can be ransomed.”

The centaurs face screwed up in scrutiny. His eyes flashed to Aurora. “This true?”

She nodded tightly.

And it maybe was? Whatever. As long as they didn’t know her entire kingdom was either dead or in Maine they’d be fine.

The centaur seemed satisfied and lumbered back over to the other centaurs. Emma sagged back into the dirt. 

“By the skin of your teeth Miss Swan.”

God. She brought her tied up hands to her face. Would this head thing **ever** go away?

Apparently not. That hand was on her chest again and it was all unnervingly pleasant. “You can feel the magic right?” When Emma said nothing Regina rolled her eyes. “Just nod, because apparently thinking your answer is too difficult.”

It was!

But she nodded.

“That’s magic. If you think back, far back, you’ll recognize it.”

“Is it good,” she whispered—and prayed Aurora was too busy being happy to be alive to notice her talking to herself.

“It’s coming for you. That’s all you need know.”

Great. More magic stuff seeking her out because apparently **she** was magic stuff.

“Yes. You’re magic Miss Swan. And that means things will seek you out just for a taste of it, but this, I think, will seek you out merely to rescue you.”

A knight in shining armor.

Regina’s lips curved into a smile that was a lot nicer and yet scarier than any Emma had seen. “Hardly.”

 

####

After twenty-eight years the roads of the Enchanted Forest had become overgrown with weeds and were pitted by heavy rains and winds, but Regina had two magical horses and knowledge of every one of those roads, and she covered the distance quickly.

Her locket of Henry’s hair took her not, as she expected, to her own kingdom, but west and south. Had it been north it might have taken her all day, but she came to a trot at the edge of a peninsula only a few hours from where she’d watered the horses. 

There was a thin plume of smoke rising from a copse of trees at the end of the peninsula and she could see a few horse tracks in the sand from where others had come and gone.

So Emma and her mother had apparently made camp. 

She clicked her tongue and Hwin broke into a walk, with Gauvin trailing laconically after them. She’d switched them out not long after they’d both been watered. While she preferred Gauvin she’d been riding him since her escape. Hwin was a gentler mount, but her back was boney and she just didn’t have the…power of Gauvin.

Damn it. She was getting fond of a horse.

She was almost grateful for that fondness when they finally broke through the copse of trees because all they found were gutted buildings, well travelled earth and blood. Gauvin’s ears pricked. A second later Hwin’s did too. 

Regina tightened her grip on the reins and dropped her hand to her side, pooling magic into and preparing to char whatever was sure to jump out of one of those buildings.

But she didn’t jump. She came out smoothly with an arrow drawn and the most haggard look Regina had ever seen on her face. And that was a significant statement. Regina’s whole life had once been the destruction of Snow White. She’d broken her down. Beaten her down. Prodded and manipulated her into a husk and still she’d shined with a mix of some eternal hope and grand hauteur. She could be shattered but Snow White never, ever broke. And yet the woman Regina stared at from across the abandoned village had a crazy gleam in her eyes and a wan pallor. 

“Regina.” Her name uttered like a curse.

“Henry—“

Her arrow was let loose, whipped an inch past Regina’s ear. Gauvin snorted in indignation. 

“You sent us here. Trapped us with these monsters.”

“Not on purpose.”

Another arrow. This time past her other ear.

“I should kill you.”

She had to say it. She didn’t want to. It was like drawing water from a stone. Yet they were the only words that would suffice. The only that might calm that fire burning in the other woman and keeping one from alighting in Regina’s hand.

So she said it, without a pregnant pause or sigh.

“But I’m here to rescue you.”

Dying might have felt better.


	7. Chapter 7

Snow’s arrow dipped down for only a fraction of a second. Habit had Regina eager to take the advantage and press the other woman back, wrap her in the vines of the trees she was shadowed in or grasp at her ankles with the ground beneath her feet.

It was almost painful fighting the urge. She balled her hand into a fist just to keep fiery doom from sprouting from her fingertips.

Snow laughed madly. “You’re here to **rescue** me?”

“Henry asked me.”

The arrow rose again and Snow’s face turned to stone. “Henry asked you.” Never had the girl sounded more distrustful or angry all at once.

“He’s my son.”

“I was your—“

“Finish that sentence and I’ll turn you to ash.” She was in **no** mood for Snow’s platitudes.

“Then the next arrow will be through your throat.”

A third party’s voice cut through the decades long battle between Regina and Snow. And it wasn’t Emma either, judging from the voice. From the corner of her eye she saw a woman in Middle Kingdom armor with a bow and notched arrow of her own carefully approach.

“If you think an arrow will do the trick than go ahead and try.”

She swung Hwin so she could watch both women. Then, perhaps because they were so “good,” neither let their arrow fly. Satisfied she wasn’t going to have to turn one of them into a slug she let her magic relax. 

“Now Snow, I’m not here for moralizing or rehashing whatever petty griefs you might have—“

“You cursed me—“

Her frustration thrilled Regina. It always had. “Henry ask that I find you both and bring you home and I agreed because unlike you I support my child rather than abandon them to the element—“

That arrow actually took a few strands of hair with it.

“Oops,” Snow said in a monotone, “it slipped.”

The third woman seemed to actually have some wits about her. She looked from one woman to the other and lowered her bow, “You’re from their land?”

“I am. Regina.”

She raised an eyebrow, “The Evil Queen?”

“Just a mayor now I’m afraid. Apparently there was a demotion built into the curse.”

The woman glanced at Snow who confirmed it with a nod. 

“And you are?”

“Mulan.”

Like the movie. How quaint.

Snow had notched another arrow, but her bow was now waist high and the arrow pointed haphazardly at the ground. “If you really came to help then why come alone? You had to know I wouldn’t just trust you.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking of **you** Snow. Your daughter and I have had many an…understanding.” They fought like archnemeses but had always united so smoothly against common enemies—working together in a fashion Regina couldn’t recall having experienced before. “ **She** knows that Henry is enough of a reason for me. Now if you’ll fetch her we can be on our way.”

“She’s been taken,” Mulan said flatly.

She glanced incredulously at Snow, “You lost her **again**.”

That time she felt the fletching brush her cheek. Regina had never had the…healthiest temper. Having Snow shoot **two** arrows “accidentally” stole whatever control she’d been exerting. As Snow drew another arrow Regina’s hand darted out from her side, orange fire cool on her fingertips before becoming a blaze of heat as it scorched towards Snow.

Until it was batted into an empty building.

Mulan had moved between them, her sword deflecting the magic and her other hand wrapped around another of Snow’s arrows, caught in its journey toward’s Regina’s heart. “Enough,” she growled, and there was a potent menace in that one word that stilled Regina’s next attack.

“What **is** that sword,” she asked—Snow forgotten for a moment.

The thin blade was pointed at Regina, its tip reflecting the mid-day sun and revealing its razor’s edge. It glimmered with magic unseen to most.

“Something strong enough to deal with you,” she warned.

Regina bristled at the threat. “I hardly think a sword will be enough to stop me if I want to kill you, or Snow,” she added with malice.

“I said **enough**.”

Clearly the little warrior meant business, and truthfully killing Snow would be satisfying but it would also damage her standing with her son and Swan.

…

Why on earth did she care what Emma Swan thought?

As if in reminder her locket flared with warm loving magic so kind and forgiving Regina paled with nausea. She surreptitiously cupped it in her hand through her shirt, pulling it away from her breast and giving her a few moments of relief.

Snow was still eyeing her darkly but had shouldered her bow and crossed the space to stand next to Mulan. 

“I guess I can work with Regina. That is if you really **are** here to help.”

The pride peppering Snow’s voice pulled a bark of laughter from Regina’s throat. “I’m a simply courier Snow. Not your little pet witch.”

“I didn’t say you—“

“The implication was quite clear. **I** didn’t lose the sheriff. You did.”

“But **you** promised Henry you’d bring her back. That means helping us rescue her and Aurora.”

“There’s another one!?”

Mulan sighed but finally sheathed her swords. “Yes, and just as you’ve sworn to protect Snow and Emma I’ve sworn to protect her.”

“I promised to return them—that’s different. Entirely.”

The warrior blinked, not really seeming to comprehend how her promising to protect a princess was very different from Regina promising to bring Emma and Snow to Henry alive.

“But,” Regina started carefully, “they’ve been taken? Together?”

By centaurs, Snow revealed. They’d been sorting through the wreckage looking for supplies when they heard Emma and the princess both scream. They’d arrived just as a centaur had ridden off with the women.

“And you didn’t go after them?”

Rage flickered again in Snow’s eyes. For half a moment Regina almost missed that girl she’d saved once upon a time. She’d been so kind and earnest. A deadly fool but there’d been only an abundance of love in her. In this Snow there was wrath and vibrant hatred.

“I suppose you believe this is my fault as well,” she asked. She knew Snow well enough to know where that rage was coming from. She’d never been this angry before. Even when Regina’s complicity in her father’s murder had come to light. Even when Regina had tried to skewer her in a jail cell. There’d been a capacity to forgive—an innate and unnatural desire to be **good**.

Motherhood, it seemed, had twisted young Snow.

“You sent us here Regina. And Emma—“

“Is old enough to manage. If I remember correctly she’s done quite well for herself without you.”

Snow snarled, “Because of you.”

“We don’t have time for this!” Mulan inserted herself between them again. “A centaur has kidnapped them. A violent beast who **will** kill them.Standing around dwelling on the past helps no one, especially Aurora and Emma.”

Snow had a laborer’s hands—even after twenty-eight years in a curse. They were strong, sinewy hands meant for butchering deer and crafting arrows. Violent hands that all the doe skin gloves her father bought her couldn’t salvage. One of them balled into a fist. She was stealing herself. Laying aside her anger with Regina. Forcing herself to swallow the bitter pill Regina had offered with her smile.

“A truce,” she said evenly, “for now.”

Regina’s mind flashed to Henry and that last smile. The locket smoldered against her skin. 

“Yes. A truce.”

 

####

Whatever was on its way to rescue her was sure as hell taking its sweet time. She’d been tied up for what felt like a night and a day. Her wrists itched, she was pretty sure she’d given herself a bladder infection and, newsflash, lying tied up on the floor of a cave and surrounded by centaurs getting drunk on wine? Not that enjoyable an experience.

And where the heck did the wine come from anyways?

“That was how they were lured here,” the ever helpful head Regina noted. She was sitting cross-legged next to Emma, her chin wresting on her balled up fist. She looked casual and approachable, which absolutely meant she was all in Emma’s head. Real Regina never looked anything but terrifying.

“Centaurs love good alcohol you see, so mankind gathered all the alcohol in the world and buried it deep in caves like this. The centaurs flocked to drink it all and mankind sealed them up.”

Until the curse.

“No. Until someone freed them. You can still feel the magic lingering on the rocks outside.”

What was weird was that if Emma thought hard she **could** feel something. It was always just on the fringe of her consciousness. A sensation she couldn’t put into words. 

Magic.

Which just made her want to giggle in hysteria.

Magic?

Snow White as her mom and the Evil Queen as Henry’s mom was bad enough. Stuck on the ground next to Sleeping Beauty and having battled a sorceress with Mulan was ridiculous.

Magic was another level. Magic wasn’t something she could turn from. Something she couldn’t set aside to better focus on problems she actually understood. Magic was **in** her. This unquantifiable **thing** existed inside of her.

It was a violation. 

“It’s a gift,” urged Regina.

One Emma didn’t want. She didn’t want to be magical or have some big destiny or this—this family. This mom who **mothered** her and a dad! She had a dad. Parents. She just wanted what she’d had. For a few brief months she and Regina had had an uneasy truce and she had had someone to parent Henry with and she’d had Henry and friends and a job and all that was enough. It was just enough.

All this **more** was too much.

Then Regina’s hand was caressing her cheek and her usually onyx eyes were a gentle brown. There was a crease in her brow forged from concern and her features were…soft. 

“It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t all right and Emma recoiled from the phantom woman’s touch.

Nothing was all right.

Not the magic or the place or the predicament or this woman who had the face of an enemy but was burrowing into the center of Emma and getting comfortable there and providing some measure of comfort in return.

None of it was right.

Regina’s lips curled up into a smile half as sharkish as the real one’s. “That’s magic dear. Makes us unrecognizable.”

Emma didn’t even know her own mind.

Or Regina’s. And if magic truly transformed than what had the mayor—no **queen** —been before she’d cursed them all? Emma felt softened by the magic. Tenderized like a piece of meat. But Regina with magic was hard and cold—a knot of fury. What Emma was becoming, gentle, was that what Regina had once been?

“You’re over thinking it Sheriff.”

And she was still stroking Emma’s skin. Leaving trails of serenity in her wake.

“They’re getting drunker,” Aurora whispered in a low voice.

Emma had forgotten she was there. 

“Perhaps—“

“We’ll wait until they pass out and break out,” Emma finished Aurora’s sentence.

Regina nodded in agreement.

There was the barest of tremors in Aurora’s voice. “They’re fast. We won’t have chance for mistakes.”

“Hey,” she twisted her whole body so she was facing Aurora and the woman in her head was just a shadow at her back, “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“That’s very gallant of you.”

“She’s a regular white knight,” Regina opined. Always so close. Suffocating if she weren’t so welcome.

“Shut up.”

Aurora eyes widened in offense. “Excuse me?”

Regina laughed. “Yes. Explain to her the woman in your head.”

That would probably go ever as well as in the real world. So she lied, “Sorry I’ve got a…headache.”

Aurora raised her eyebrow.

“Brilliant,” Regina muttered into the hand she’d brought up to cover her face in shame. 

“It’s making me weird,” she tried to give Aurora an appeasing smile, but it didn’t really work to well.

“You’ve… had this headache for sometime,” the princess said carefully.

Like she’d actually noticed all the times Emma had talked to Regina out loud. Shit. Why—weren’t princesses supposed to be oblivious  or something?

“Clearly you’ve forgotten your mother the master archer.”

She glared at Regina who quietly just buffed her nails on her coat.

“Emma,” Aurora called, “Is…you’re acting as though someone is here with us, and you have since the centaur abducted us.”

“It’s nothing.”

“We’re to entrust our lives to one another so I disagree.”

How exactly did you tell someone you barely knew that you had an unusually helpful evil queen living in your head? Especially if you didn’t want them to think you were insane.

“This is a land of magic if you’re ever to find someone understanding of your predicament it’s here.” 

A **ridiculously** helpful evil queen.

“Thank you Sheriff.”

“Emma.” Aurora had big pale eyes, visible even this far back in the cave.

“I, uh, ate some weird berries earlier. I think they’re making me hallucinate.”

Regina was mortified at the lie. Aurora was mortified at the stupidity.

Emma was just mortified at the whole damn situation.

Whatever big magic fancy thing coming to rescue her needed to be in the cave already, preferably with some sort of magic stick that her make her forget the whole day.

 

####

Mulan had declared she could track the centaur easily so Regina decided not to tell them about her Charming family compass. She assured herself it was because she wanted to avoid questions. Not because every minute she wore it she felt better and more human than she had in decades. Not because the thing was filled with an addictive magic forged in the love and brightness that had come from her son.

It was something private. Just for Regina. One thing Snow White couldn’t ruin with a raised eyebrow or her treacherous words.

They rode in silence. Snow and Mulan took Hwin after Gauvin nearly bolted when Snow approached him.

“Good taste,” Regina had purred.

“New rule,” that was Mulan, “no talking.”

Snow opened her mouth.

“From **either** of you.”

So they were quiet. It was an easy way to maintain the truce. Though Snow seemed to take issue with it. She was brimming with anger and took every opportunity to peg Regina with an angry glare.

When they stopped to water their horses that afternoon Regina made certain Mulan was out of earshot before commenting. “I’m surprised Snow.”

Suspicion kept Snow’s face a mask. “No talking. Remember?” She pulled a water skin off of Hwin’s saddle and went upstream to fill it.

Regina followed, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off a bitter wind channeled down the stream. “You were always so forgiving. So **happy**.”

“Regina…”

“Now it seems you despise me like your husband.”

Snow stilled in her work. Crouched at the stream’s edge like that, with her face tilted just so, she was difficult to see. Nothing more than a silhouette. “You came for Henry.”

“I did.”

“You risked your life and tore a hole between worlds for him.”

“As any good mother capable would.”

The girl, no, the woman. She’d become a woman at some point. Petulance and naiveté clung to her but she had had a child and she had had a husband and she’d spent twenty-eight years living alone and staring wistfully at nothing at all and she was an adult. Her jaw set. Jutted out childishly. 

A terrifying prospect dawned on Regina. Peered over the horizon of her thoughts. Snow was mad about the curse and mad because she and Emma had been sent here but what really, genuinely infuriated her—what had her lobbing arrows and sneering wasn’t Emma being in danger as she’d assumed. It was…jealously.

She was jealous of Henry.

She.

The words—the very concept—fled from Regina’s grasp. The idea was too heinous.

They were mortal enemies. Pitted in combat for generations. They were not…family. Family wasn’t what they had ever had. They were strangers sharing a castle and villains in each other’s tragedies.

She was not Snow’s mother. She was not someone whose affection should be desired. Not by Snow White. Not ever.

But there it was. The jealously. Recognizing it made it all familiar. She could even taste it on the air. 

She took a step away from Snow. The heel of her boot slipped on the pebbled shore of the stream but she was still lithe enough to catch herself before she could fall.

Snow looked up at the sound. Confirmed those terrible ideas with her mixture of concern and contempt.

Regina spoke before thinking. Lashed out before her owen fears could be spied. “Jealousy doesn’t suit you dear.”

The accusation leeched the color from Snow’s face, making her name more apt than ever. Knowing Snow as she did she knew what would come next. Knew how explanations would be served up. Denials would be delivered as swiftly as one of her arrows.

And Regina wanted none of it. She scrambled back to Gauvin and busied herself checking his tack. He snorted in irritation and shook his whole head like Regina were a swarm of flies.

“I’m not jealous.” Snow had followed her.

Regina’s hand curled over the pommel, her fingernails bit into the leather and met resistance at the wood beneath. 

“And I was never your mother.”

 

####

The silence that chased them from the stream was suffocating. Snow’s wrath had been abated and that wounded look she’d had since childhood had reemerged.

And Regina felt ill. As though she felt guilt over her words.

They were cruel, some bright spot inside whispered. 

And necessary she reminded herself. She was not Snow’s mother and she never had been. She’d been a nanny. A nursemaid. Whatever she felt for Snow would never compare to her love for Henry. That was genuine. That was absent kings and wealth and an omnipresent mother.

It was real. No matter what her curse said. No matter whose “true love” annihilated it. What she felt for Henry was honest.

So why so cruel, that voice wondered.

Because Snow had to know. There needed to be no more illusions. No more lies. Not for Snow’s sake, but for Regina’s. Her life had been double speak for so long and Henry—Henry had urged her to be honest. That meant extinguishing that last little flame of affection Snow had had for her. 

She’d wanted to do it for so long. Divorce herself from the other woman. Now with her task finally complete why was she nauseous? Why was Henry’s magic warring with her own and leaving her feeling ill?

“Regina?”

“Is she all right,” Mulan asked Snow.

“I’m fine,” she snapped. She sat up straighter in her saddle and choked up on Gauvin’s reigns. He shivered in offense. 

“Good, because I think we are near.” Mulan pointed a gloved hand down the hill to a valley shadowed from the afternoon sun. There was a crevice in the opposite hill. Rocks were littered around the entrance of a cave and the grass had been ground into the mud by hoof prints.

“They’re not very subtle.”

“They don’t have to be,” Snow said, “they’re centaurs.”

What no one asked was why they were even out. They’d been sealed up in dozens of caves just like the one below. With the last stone in place they’d fallen into a deep sleep. The cave entrances had then been enchanted and hidden.

It would take potent magic to open such a cave. The kind of magic that could not have survived in the Enchanted Forest.

What was most disturbing is even from a distance she could sense the magic and it was…familiar.

Beside her Snow and Mulan got very busy plotting a rescue involving what sounded like fire arrows and a liberal use of Regina’s magic. 

“What an excellent plan, I’ll use magic on creatures notoriously resistant to it.”

“Well, what would **you** suggest,” Snow asked. 

She studied their surroundings a moment.

“Come on Regina. You’re trying to be less evil right? Good people actually help plot the rescue.”

Shutting Snow up would be as simple as conjuring thread from the air and sealing her lips with it.

Probably not the thing a good person does, that voice observed.

No. Certainly not.

And she wanted to be good. She wanted Henry to look at her like he looked at Emma. She’d once tried to keep him to herself at whatever the cost. Now she only wanted him to love her. Costs again didn’t matter, but now neither did pride.

“You have an idea,” Mulan asked.

Yes. Yes, she did. An awful one involving risk, selflessness and, of all things, keeping Snow out of harm’s way.

 

####

Centaurs didn’t just like alcohol. They could handle it like that one set of alcoholics that had her for three months and forgot she was even living with them for a week. They just drank.

And drank.

And drank.

Then they’d throw up in the corner of the cave and go drink some more. Sometimes they’d pause in their drinking (and singing—oh God there was singing) to stand over her and Aurora and berate them in what she was pretty sure was Centauranese…or whatever the hell the native language of centaurs was.

They didn’t actually ask her or Aurora any questions beyond the first encounter that morning. They’d been hired by someone. Employed and paid with who the hell knew to kidnap Emma and Mary Margaret. But now they just had her and the promise of Aurora’s ransom and instead of going off to abduct Mary Margaret too, or to actually claim that ransom, they just drank.

Which meant they were waiting. Likely for their employer.

Likely for Cora.

She’d been really good about not dwelling on the woman who showed up more than once in her extended family tree. That woman terrified her. Took her back to a pre-magic world where she was powerless. And small. She’d met far too may “parents” like Cora Mills. Though she was the first to actually be an evil witch. Or sorceress.

“Aurora?”

Aurora had decided to sit. She’d muttered something about “sleeping enough” when she’d pulled herself up. It looked really uncomfortable. Her legs were bound at the ankles and her wrists had enough thick rope around them that she could barely move her fingers. She had to curve her back to lean forward and balance her arms on her knees.

It gave her a better view of the cave versus Emma’s much more comfortable supine position. And she never stopped watching their captors. There was a lot more to the girl than her raggy dress and poor decision to attack Mary Margaret when they first met would suggest.

“Is there a difference between sorcerers and witches in this world?”

“Witches tend to be ugly,” Aurora said without missing a beat.

“Seriously. That’s the only difference?” She figured it would be like the difference between a nerd and a geek where there wasn’t actually a difference unless you were a nerd or a geek and cared. 

“Well,” she amended, “at least where I’m from. My mother’s enemy was a beautiful sorceress. Like your mother’s was a wicked witch turned ugly by her own malice.”

“Regina’s a lot of things, ugly isn’t one of them.”

“She is fair then?”

Emma always hated when people asked her to rate the attractiveness of other women. It made her fidgety. Brushed against thoughts in her head she was perfectly content to keep boxed up. And talking about Regina being attractive was like fingers on the box’s lid.

“Sure. She’s fair,” she said quickly.

She expected head Regina to pop up then. Maybe tease her. But instead she was sneaking across the cave, carefully stepping between sleeping centaurs and clinging to shadows that seemed to darken further as she moved through them.

That was new.

So was head Mulan following closely with an unsheathed sword.

She let her own head fall to the ground and closed her eyes.

Great. The head brigade was multiplying. Now it wasn’t just the woman she was raising her son with it was also a woman she’d known for about a **day**. Who would show up next? David? Snow? Would Jiminy Cricket soon appear on her shoulder as an actual bug?

“Miss Swan,” Regina said urgently, “it’s time to wake up.”

Five more minutes Regina. Emma was trying to will her brain to stop with the psychosis.

She crouched next to her and Emma could actually **smell** her perfume mingled with an earthy horsey kind of smell and sweat. “While I would love to tell Henry you couldn’t make it because you were too lazy to get up, I did make a promise. So please Sheriff, get up.” 

So urgent sounding. Jeeze Regina. What was going to happen? More talk of magic while she looked lovingly and disturbingly into Emma’s eyes—ow! Ow pinching!

Her eyes shot open to find Regina’s thumb and forefinger digging into the one little bit of her waistline she was always going to have because she liked pancakes.

“Would you stop,” she nearly shouted.

“Good, you’re awake.”

Regina’s fingers started working at the knots keeping Emma in place but centaurs apparently taught sailors everything they knew. They were completely Gordian in nature. 

Which is when a gust of air shot out of Regina’s mouth and tickled her hair. And then she stretched out her fingers and stared intently at the knots.

And they untangled themselves as thought manipulated by magic.

“You’re not in my head are you,” she whispered finally.

Judging by the way Mulan was hacking at Aurora’s restraints and then helping her to her feet and Regina was looking at her like she was sniffing glue she was gonna go with “no.”

Regina’s cold fingers pressed against the skin of her forehead. “Are you unwell,” she asked formally.

She batted her fingers away, “I’m **fine**. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Saving you Sheriff.” Her smile was so chilly Emma actually shivered. She motioned to the entrance. “Now may we go?”

Aurora and Mulan, the traitors, hadn’t waited for them and were already there. Regina stood with an oof, her knees cracking way too loud for comfort in the cave. Emma shot her a dirty look to shut the hell up but Regina, the real Regina, alive and in the Enchanted Forest and here to **rescue her** just rolled her eyes and offered her hand.

Which Emma took, because even though she was a good thirty plus years younger she’d still been tied up for nearly twenty-four hours. Her bones didn’t creak but ye gods her bladder. She was afraid if she stood up fully it would just…go right there in the cavern.

Regina misinterpreted her grimace and slipped her arm under Emma’s shoulders to provide support. Which, okay actually that made it a little better. They made their way to the exit.

“They’ve hurt you,” Regina whispered.

“No, just…bathroom.”

“You have to go to the **bathroom**?”

“I’ve been stuck tied up in a cave of centaurs for the last day there wasn’t really an opportunity Regina.”

“You could have just—“

“No I could not.”

“Oh for heaven’s—“ Regina pulled away from her and knelt right in front of her.

Emma watched the drunk centaurs nervously. “What the hell are you doing,” she asked out the side of her mouth.

Regina glanced up through the dark of her hair, “We don’t have time for you to just **go** and you’ve nearly crippled yourself.”

“So let’s cripple me a little longer and get. Out. Side.”

But Regina wasn’t listening. Her face was screwed up in concentration and her hands were pressed against Emma’s belly like she was trying to feel for a kicking baby.

Instead of the sweet relief that she was kind of hoping Regina was going to provide that queer feeling—not the pee one but the back of her mind one—rose up. Charged straight through her system like a raging bull.

Energy. Actual energy. It just exploded out of her in a concussive wave that was really more on par with a fairy fart. Having never had something like that happen to her before Emma looked down at Regina for explanation but Regina was too busy staring at Emma’s stomach in absolute shock. Eventually her eyes rose to meet Emma’s.

Emma found her voice, “What was that?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Her hands still hovered over Emma’s stomach and she squinted her eyes like she was about to try whatever it was again. Emma clasped her wrist. “Maybe we don’t try that again right now.”

“But whatever happened was fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like it.” God she sounded like such a…a nerd geek.

She didn’t get long to imagine Regina wearing a little suit as a fifteen year old and talking Star Wars vs Star Trek with the rest of the debate team.

Because the wave of magic did more than startle them both.

So Emma went completely still. It was a habit. Some vestigial memory from when she was nine and they took all the kids to see Jurassic Park and the guy on the screen said to be perfectly still when a T-Rex was around.

It really didn’t apply to centaurs are far as she knew. The couple that had drunkenly shouted at her all seemed to see her just fine. But this time they were collectively stirring. The magic puff that had exploded out of her had woken them.

So she froze because that just seemed natural.

Then Regina was twisting her arm so she was the one holding Emma’s wrist and she tugging her to the entrance. They didn’t use words—though they’d also reached the point where words probably wouldn’t help.

She was kind of hoping when she came outside she’d find Mary Margaret in a full suit of armor and improbably at the head of a giant army of centaur killers. Instead they were in a valley with Mulan and Aurora settling into the saddle of a giant blond horse and another horse calmly munching on grass.

Regina made a bee line to the other one and leapt spritely into the empty saddle.

In the cave behind them the centaurs started shouting in their guttural language. Mulan and Aurora’s horse bolted towards the opposite hill. It was completely dark but she could have **sworn** she saw Mary Margaret’s ghastly pink sweater up there.

“Emma hurry!”

She wasn’t sure which was more surprising. Regina suddenly shouting like she almost cared or Regina using her first name.

She offered Emma her hand. “Come on, get up.”

“It’s a giant horse. I can’t just hop up—“

Regina quickly latched onto her wrist and pulled her up onto the horse with the kind of strength that one of those gigantic centaurs would have.

“How are you so freakishly strong!”

“Magic. Now quiet. I need to concentrate.” She held her hands out and a whisp of something that looked like natural gasp guttering from an unlit stove swirled from her fingers.

The first centaurs out of the cave paused beside them and pointed at Mulan and Aurora’s hasty escape up the hill to where Mary Margaret was **definitely** standing around in that sweater. She needed to burn that thing if they ever made it home. More scrambled out. And right past her and Regina.

“Regina, why can’t they see us.”

“Because I’m hiding us. Quiet.”

“But they can see Mulan and Aurora?”

“That’s their problem.”

Emma slapped her shoulder. “You can’t just leave them like that.”

“I can,” she said through gritted teeth.

Dozens of centaurs were out of the cave. They had spears. Swords. It was a regular convention of weapons Emma never thought she’d actually see wielded in real life.

And then one of them had an arrow in his eye and he was falling to the ground in pain.

Regina grunted, “Damn it. That idiot!”

“Who’s shooting arrows.”

“Your idiot mother.” Another centaur fell. “Who, before you ask, has no chance of outrunning these centaurs and not nearly enough arrows to kill them all.”

“Then explode them.”

“They’re centaurs. I can’t just explode a herd of them with a thought!”

She slapped her again. “Regina,” her hand’s beat against Regina’s shoulder was constant. Insistent. “Regina. We can’t—we have to help them.”

In Regina’s outstretched hand that substance like gas ignited into a ball of fire. It was so bright, so hot, that Emma had to shade her eyes. The screeched from her fingers like a missile, piercing the air with a shattering noise and smoldered against the skin of one of the centaurs forming a plume of fire and smoke that drew the attention of every. Single. One of them. 

They all turned to face Emma and Regina. 

Silence.

Regina’s hands took up the reigns. Her body, pressed against Emma’s front, tensed. The moment before action. The calm before the storm.

What could they do to protect Mary Margaret? How could they possibly take on a whole herd of giant man horse things?

The fire dissipated leaving the centaurs unharmed.

How could they fight that?

Regina stood up just a fraction in her stirrups. Emma pulled herself closer to her as she felt the beast beneath her grow so still.

So fighting wasn’t the option.

Nope.

Regina’s face was a mixture of joy and anger and maybe something else. Maybe fear. Her knuckles turned white on the reins. Slowly the centaurs advanced.

“Now,” she said for Emma’s benefit. “We run.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for your warm responses! Feedback is always appreciated—even if it’s to tell me I’m pedantic. And a special note to those eagerly awaiting the final chapter of Causal Fallacy. It’s coming! Soon. Honest!

“Hold on tight!”

Wiry arms wrapped around Regina’s waist and a soft and strong all at once body pressed up against her back. A puff of air against her ear. Magic flared in the locket.

“The saddle Sheriff! Hold onto the saddle!”

The hands around her waist blindly reached for the pommel in front of her, but Regina didn’t have time to make sure Emma had a firm grip. With one hand she tugged on the reins to spin Gauvin around and with the other she reached behind her to grasp Emma’s hideous jacket and pull her closer.

“Don’t let go,” she shouted.

And then her heels were digging into Gauvin’s flank and he was leaping forward. The arms around her tensed and she actually patted one in comfort.

But that was the last time she could pay attention to Emma. She had to hope the woman knew how to hold on for dear life because Regina had other concerns. 

She’d just struck an entire herd of angry, drunk centaurs with a fireball and now she had to outrun the fasted footed equine related creatures in all the land on the back of a magic horse with a woman she was **positive** had never even **touched** a horse before.

 

####

They were doomed.

“Have you ever even ridden a horse before?”

She was pressed up against Regina’s back and trying to hold on by clamping her legs down on the saddle and horse beneath and Regina kept sort of standing in the stirrups. Which was insane. The thing they were on had an mind of it’s own and was all wriggly and foreign and you were supposed to clamp down, not leap out of the saddle.

From her vantage point all close to her it was very easy to see Regina’s scowl. “I’ve been riding horses since I was a child,” she shouted into the wind.

“So what’s with all the—“ They leapt over an outcropping of rocks and Regina actually leaned forward, her ass rising and forcing Emma to rise with her or risk getting a butt-full of Regina Mills in her face. “—Standing!”

“It helps the horse take the jumps and keeps him from getting tired faster!”

They came to another pile of rocks and Regina again stood, but this time she reached behind her to pull Emma up with her and hold her close.

“Just stick to me and you’ll be fine!”

But really, how fine could you be when a spear was lobbed at your head and struck the ground only a foot in front of them and to the left. Regina pulled the reins right and the horse turned so sharply Emma nearly lost her balance. She forgot what she was doing and grabbed Regina around the waist for support.

Regina’s hand fell briefly to Emma’s joined hands. Her fingers, dry and rough when before they’d always seemed smooth and supple, squeezed her.

“We’ll be fine,” she reassured Emma again. Then she bent forward in the saddle and Emma, remembering that she was supposed to “stick to” Regina, molded herself to the other woman, lying her head flat between her shoulders blades and holding on for dear life.

Another spear sailed by.

 

####

If it were not for the herd of centaurs and the princess wrapped around her like a blanket Regina would have been smiling. She wasn’t riding towards a destination or seeking someone out. She was riding just to ride. Letting the wind whip her hair about and the arms around her waist keep her warm and feeling the muscles work beneath her thighs. Every jump they took put her heart in her throat, every sharp turn transmitted tremors of joy up her arms.

It was that day again. Astride Rocinante and racing towards the border of Leopold’s lands. That instant before vines snatched her from her horse and set her before her mother and a path of malevolence that she still found herself on even as she rescued Emma Swan.

And she really was rescuing her. Like a heroine in Henry’s book. She’d pulled her from the cave and onto Gauvin and they were racing over hills and through forests and away from centaurs that had yet to hit them with one of those—

“Spear,” Emma cried helpfully. “Left.”

So Regina zagged right.

“Right.”

So Regina zagged left.

They came to a sudden drop in terrain and Regina rose in the saddle. But Emma was getting better, and even without stirrups she managed to lift herself a little too, putting all her weight on Regina and pressing her breasts in Regina’s back.

They struck the ground and loose dirt flew up around them as Gauvin lurched forward. The movement was sudden—different than the other jumps, and she felt Emma’s grasp slip.

And then…then Regina saved her again. Pulled her close by the arm and then reached around the grasp her knee and ensure she stayed in place.

“I’m flattered but now’s not the time,” Emma shouted into the wind.

If Regina flushed, which she was very certain she didn’t, it was hidden in the falling darkness.

“Now is not the time for your pathetic attempts flirting Ms. Swan!”

“Back to the miss?” They leapt over a tree root. “I thought we were past that when you poisoned our son!”

“That was an accident! You eat everything in sight! How was I—”

“Left!”

“Supposed to know you’d finally decide to share your food.”

“Left!” Emma actually jerked her arms to the left and nearly sent them both tumbling from the saddle, Regina clamped down on Gauvin’s back and reached behind her for Emma.

“Try not to knock us off the horse you idiot!”

“Then listen to—Right!”

Regina didn’t wait for a tug in that direction, instead pulling on Gauvin’s reigns and sending them even further left. The spear just barely missed them and the move took them careening down an embankment and into a stream.

“Jesus, that’s cold.” Emma shivered against her and she desperately hoped that those were two buttons on the woman’s jacket pressing against her back.

She chanced a glance up the embankment they descended and saw only the landscape. “Hopefully we’ve lost them—“

 

####

Okay.

How many spears could one herd of centaurs have? Seriously?

“Do they have some kind of spear conjurer thing back there?”

“I presume they’re just well armed.”

“That’s like the thousandth they’ve lobbed at our heads! Shouldn’t their arms be getting tired or something?”

Regina twisted her whole body to look behind them, seemingly trusting the horse not to screw up. Emma had to sort of tilt to one side to give her a better view.

The Evil Queen looked anything but evil then with her flushed cheeks and bright eyes and wind swept hair. She kind of reminded her of head Regina—who hadn’t made an appearance since the real deal had showed up.

“Simply out running them won’t do,” Regina mumbled to herself. She tucked herself back against the horse and Emma followed suit.

And why wasn’t head Regina showing up? Had she been some kind of brain hologram magic thing? Sent by Regina as a way to communicate? Was that even possible? They had to be connected somehow, but then if Regina and head Regina were connected how were Regina and Emma connected? Beyond that bizarre moment in the cave she was pretty sure there hadn’t been anything magical.

God.

Magic.

Magic was something that scared her when she was a little kid in movies and something that Henry talked about and made her worry for his sanity. Magic was not—

So many fucking spears!

“Can’t you just conjure up an uzi and let me go to town on these guys?”

“That’s not how it works,” Regina said through gritted teeth. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her face. She’d been hopping up and down in the saddle for ages and manipulating the enormous beast under them. For a lady that had spent twenty-eight years behind a desk that had to be a lot of work. And the exhaustion was showing itself.

“Well I don’t think we’re going to be outrunning them anytime soon.” She’d pulled herself as close as possible so she could say the words a little softer into Regina’s ear. Like she was trying to make the woman feel better by delivering the news gently.

Regina shivered in her arms. “No.” There was defeat there. “I don’t suppose we will.”

She hadn’t meant to **gut** the woman. She just wanted her to help Emma formulate a new plan that involved less dodging of spears and more fighting or something.

They lumbered up the embankment opposite from the way they’d come, escaping the stream and causing the horse to wheeze in exhaustion. It stumbled and Regina dug her heels in and pulled up on the reins. She was forcing the horse. Grunting a “come on Gauvin,” as she kicked again. At the steepest point, when it looked like the horse might just collapse from the strain of the climb Regina’s hand leapt out to hold Emma close again.

It was deeply disturbing how much that comforted her.

And made her miss that almost gentle apparition that had kept her company in the cave.

 

####

A full gallop wasn’t a gait a horse could maintain for very long. It was a sprint. An escape. A gait the horse achieved with a burst of adrenalin. Gauvin was a magical horse with an endurance and speed ten times that of another horse, but even he was not immune to fatigue and she’d been riding him hard for days and now had him at a full gallop and carrying her and Emma. 

She was, in fact, a little surprised he’d made it so far without lagging. But that’s where they were, stuck with a desperately fatigued horse. She could pour the magic into him and urge him on with cheerful pleas but it could only do so much. 

They were coming to the end of this foolish adventure.

And Emma still clung to her. She hadn’t let go in some time and while she would have been more secure holding onto the saddle in front of Regina she seemed content to wrap her arms around Regina’s waist. Sometimes she even thought she felt an errant thumb stroking her stomach. It was awful and it was nice.

Everything was becoming foreign to Regina. Tilting into something unrecognizable.

Except for the world itself.

In their mad dash from the cave they’d forged deeper and deeper into the Enchanted Forest and come to places she recognized. They’d twisted in the years. A blanket of thick vines covered the trees and made paths she’d once travelled in the back of her carriage too tangled to navigate.

But she knew where she was, and she knew a way, that maybe, with luck and power, the might finally escape their pursuers.

She drew magic from inside of her, so much that her eyes drifted closed briefly and sleep chased the alertness from her. Then the magic forced its way out of her forming of scythe of force ahead of then. It sliced through the vines and created a path she quickly led Gauvin through.

Emma, for once in all the time Regina had known her, didn’t question her motives. She kept tucked against her, their thighs rubbing together in an almost perverse fashion that she desperately wanted to not consider long.

Until—

 

####

“Why are you leading us straight for a giant canyon?” It was a question but it came out of Emma’s mouth so suddenly and harshly that it sounded more like a plea. As in “please don’t send us off the cliff like Thelma and Louise because I don’t want to die and I really don’t like you enough to do a suicide pact.”

“We’ll make it!” As if to reinforce this very stupid promise Regina kicked her heels and slapped the excess reins against the horse’s sides. It whinnied in protest but picked up speed. 

“Regina,” Emma warned.

“Hold on tight.”

“That’s got to be a hundred foot jump!”

“And you’ve got a magic horse and a sorceress!” Far from the villain of Henry’s book this Regina sounded young, earnest and foolishly hopefully. She half expected her to reassure herself out loud. Or to chance it and squeeze Emma’s hand again.

But there was only a little bit of a hero in the evil queen and her eyes turned dark with magic. Magic Emma had never been closer to. It was all around them. Menacing. Suffocating. It crawled over Emma’s skin like a thousand centipedes. Reached inside of her and pulled her out kicking and screaming exposing nerves she didn’t even know she had to the night air.

Then the horse was leaping and the magic was crackling around them and propelling the beast forward. Regina rose in the saddle. Emma moved with her, as though they were tethered.

Was this magic? Was this what it felt like to use it? It was foreign and natural at once. Reading glasses after reading the book blurry for years. Terrifying, and she was without that knowing Regina in her head to alleviate her fears.

The horse slammed into the ground. Dirt flew. Emma’s stomach lurched. Her bladder held. Barely. Excruciatingly.

Regina turned the horse around so that they could face the way they’d come.

Jesus that had been a jump. Not quite leaping the Grand Canyon, but far enough that Emma got queasy just looking at the space.

The centaurs came to a violent halt on the other side, grasping at each other to keep from going over and shoving and shouting while gesticulating angrily at them.

“They’re not going for it?”

“They can’t.”

“Oh well then—“ she gave them a gesture of her own.

“Sheriff.”

Suck on that.

“Miss Swan.”

How fancy were their horse bodies now?

“Emma.”

Holy shit those fucking **spears** were like missiles.

“They can still throw.” Regina’s comment was somewhere between amused and annoyed. Both sentiments definitely related to how intelligent she thought Emma was.

The burliest centaur hefted another spear.

“Regina? Maybe we should…”

“Yes. I would agree.”

Regina put the horse back into motion, but this time at a much more leisurely pace. He stopped wheezing soon after and was content to lope through the overgrown forest like they were just out for an evening ride.

“So I’m guessing from how we’re **not** galloping for our lives anymore we’re safe for now?”

“The nearest pass over that canyon will take them hours to get to and while you and I can dismount and continue walking to put distance between us they’ve—“

“Been running a marathon already.”

“Precisely. They’ll give up, or they’ll spend days trying to track us—a skill centaurs aren’t known for.” She brought the horse to a stop. 

“And that’s good for Gauvin as well, he needs a rest from carrying the both of us.”

The horse snorted in what suspiciously sounded like agreement.

And Emma wasn’t complaining. Her bladder was still screaming and her legs were burning from all the riding. She scooted away from Regina and then very clumsily dismounted by sliding over the saddle and off the backside of the horse. Regina dismounted like a fancy queen and was all graceful swinging her leg over and coming to stand beside the horse.

“Who on earth taught you to dismount,” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“I was a foster kid! Horse riding wasn’t exactly on the curriculum.”

Regina nodded and appraised her like her ninth grade soccer coach. “So I should probably warn you that standing directly behind a horse is a good way to get kick—“

Emma’s bad ass bounty hunter reflexes were the only thing that saved her from the vicious hooves of that demon Regina called a horse.

She cursed and slipped, falling back on her ass and feeling the pain all the way to her bladder which was—oh God.

 

####

It was only when Emma was staring at her haplessly from the ground, her eyes wide with pain and surprise, that Regina remembered what had set them on this whole path to begin with.

Emma’s nearly cripplingly full bladder.

She was clearly trying to avoid the shame of wetting her pants. Gingerly she pulled herself back up and then her jittery fingers went to work her zipper while she muttered something about crazy mayors and stupid mules and “oh sweet Jesus this stupid zipper.”

“Do you need—“

“No!”

She almost pitied the other woman. Denim pants could be trying at the best of times. Skin tight denim that looked like it was painted on and coupled with an aching need to use the restroom seemed to have turned them into a prison that Swan could not escape.

No. There was no almost. She **did** pity the woman. She snapped her fingers and the zipper shot out of Emma’s startled hands and her pants opened suddenly. She turned as red as her wretched jacket. Mumbling what sounded suspiciously like a “thank you” she dashed into the brush.

A groan followed a moment later so enthusiastic Regina actually blushed herself. She ducked her head and stared intently at Gauvin’s mane. It was tangled and sweaty from days of constant riding and her fingers worked at the knots as another, decidedly more rapturous, moan came from the brush.

“Should I leave you alone,” she called.

Emma grunted a “sec.” Almost true to her word thirty seconds later she emerged looking more satisfied than any lover Regina had had in the last thirty years.

But as soon as she caught sight of Regina staring she abruptly looked downwards, her hand going to the back of her head to scratch sheepishly. “Sorry. And, uh, thanks I guess.”

“It was that or be stuck with the smell.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t to crazy about the smell either. Or the, you know, wet pants chafing thing.”

“Always unpleasant.”

“Yup.”

Emma looked up again, catching Regina’s eyes and shooting her an incandescent smile that reminded her far too much of Henry’s magic in her locket. Or maybe…no, there was a playful curve to the smile. Like Emma had heard a joke and was trying not to laugh.

“So. You risked life and limb to come all the way to an apocalyptic fairytale land to rescue me.”

The brat. She rolled her eyes, “ **Retrieve** you. Henry asked.”

“Is he—“

“He’s fine. As fine as one can be in your father’s care.” She brushed at the dust on her hip-length riding jacket. The dark fabric had gone a bit gray from the endless travel. “But the sooner we return home the better.”

“I can agree with you there. I guess we just grab Mary Margaret and you, what? Snap your fingers and pop us home?”

If only it were that simple. “Sadly it will require a little more effort than that. Opening a portal from that land is easy, creating one to get back is…difficult.”

What was left of Emma’s smile disappeared, “Like how difficult?”

“The last time it required a curse.”

Emma winced. 

“If we had some…a weak point. Perhaps that lovely little wardrobe your parents abandoned you to.”

“That could be a problem.” That infuriating bravado the woman wore like one of her ridiculous jackets resurfaced. “The wardrobe is kind of…destroyed.”

 

####

The woman’s eyes actually bulged.

“You’ve been here a **week**. How have you destroyed it already?”

“It wasn’t my fault.” Regina raised an eyebrow. “Okay. It was. I actually set fire to it,” before Regina could call her an idiot again she hastily continued, “but only because your psycho mom was about to choke the life out of Mary Margaret.”

The mention of her mother had Regina going ghastly pale. The color leaching from her cheeks and she tilted her head, blinking rapidly and acting like she hadn’t just had someone jumping on her grave.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your mom showed up when we got to the wardrobe and was ready to kill us before I burned it and Mulan started batting her fireballs.”

Her jaw clenched as though she was trying not to explode and she stalked forward her hands framing an invisible box. “My mother is dead.”

“No. She isn’t.”

“I saw the body myself.”

“You sure she wasn’t just under a sleeping curse?”

“No,” she snapped. Then took a deep breath. “No. She was dead.”

“She’s alive now. And I’m pretty sure she’s the reason those centaurs kidnapped me.”

“Abducted.”

“Excuse me?”

“Kidnapping can only happen to children, and as infantile as you are Ms. Swan you’re still an adult. You were abducted.”

“That is beside the point,” she huffed haughtily. “Your mother is alive and I kind of get the feeling that’s bad for all of us.”

“Very.” Her eyes were flickering around them and Emma realized that Regina was actually plotting. Considering their options in her head and so deep in thought she couldn’t even be bothered to go still. “We need to get something to get us home, but we also need to make sure my mother doesn’t follow.” She said it out loud more for her own benefit, because Emma had no clue how the hell they were supposed to find something to make a portal **or** find a way to keep Cora from doing the same.

Suddenly Regina’s eyes stopped their wandering and focused on her. “There’s a compass, in the land of the giants. The only one of its kind. My mother would need it to navigate to our land once she opens a portal. Without it she’d be wandering for centuries.”

“So we get it first and she’s stuck wandering around like the guy from Quantum Leap or she gives up all together.”

“Inane reference aside, yes. But it will have to be your mother. That Middle Kingdom woman Mulan has a sword that will be able to cut through the enchantments on the beanstalk. It keeps most humans from climbing it.”

“They have to climb a beanstalk?”

“Naturally.”

“Right. Fairytale land. Will they meet up with Jack on the way?”

Regina frowned. “Of course not. She died years ago.”

“And while we send them to face off with a giant and steal a compass what are you and I doing?”

“We’ll be sneaking into a palace and stealing a disused portal I know of.”

“Of course.”

Regina took the reins of the horse and guided him away from where Emma was still standing trying to sort it all out.

“Wait. I thought everyone was cursed. Why are we sneaking into a castle?”

“Because there are some people so revolting I didn’t want to see them day in and out for thirty years.”

“Worse than a dragon and Gold?”

“Not worse,” she said after a moment, “just a different kind of wretched.”

“And you left them with a castle?” That seemed awfully nice.

“Jack Bluebeard already had a castle.”

She wracked her brain for that particular fairytale, but in her head all she could see was a guy with a bushy beard and a tricorne hat. “We have to sneak into the palace of a pirate?”

Regina stumbled. “What on **earth** are you talking about?”

“Bluebeard. He’s a pirate.”

“ **Black** beard is the pirate. Now stop standing back there behind Gauvin unless you want to get kicked at again.”

Emma really wanted to ignore Regina’s request because she was pretty sure she was genetically predisposed to doing the exact opposite of everything the woman did or said, but the horse, Gauvin, swung his head around to stare at her and stomped his back feet.

“Horse looks at my head like it’s a soccer ball,” she mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing. So who’s this Bluebeard if not a pirate?”

“Growing up I just knew him as a duke with a penchant for collecting dead wives. Now I would probably classify him as a serial killer.”

“He murders his wives and nobody stops him?”

“It’s a very different world Ms. Swan.”

“Yeah, with, like, princesses and destiny.”

“And serial killers. It’s not all nice.” 

“Example, yourself. But how does that even happen?”

“He was very good at hiding it and Leopold was very, very gullible.”

“Leopold that’s my—“

“Grandfather. Yes.”

The guy Regina had apparently had murdered. Which was crazy to think about. Not that Regina didn’t seem capable of it, she’d definitely accidentally poisoned her own son and Emma had met plenty of criminals who looked and acted a lot nicer than they actually were.

It was the grandfather thing. The idea that she **had** a grandfather and that the guy had married a woman only a couple of years older than her.

“So gramps,” she asked, “what was he like?”

Regina looked startled by the question and nearly stumbled again, but Emma caught her by the elbow. “You’re asking me?”

“Sure. I mean, I guess I could ask Mary Margaret but she’s about the nicest person I know and I get the feeling whatever she’d say would be, kind of, I don’t know? Too nice?”

“He was quite kind to her, and many others.”

“But not to you?”

She would have thought Regina was just being a jerk again if not for the faraway look she got. “I think we should probably let your mother know our plan, don’t you?”

It wasn’t the **worst** segue Emma had ever been a party too. But she could have at least said “I don’t want to talk to you about what led me to murder your grandfather.” Okay. Maybe not. That was too on the nose. 

But it was all so weird. She’d gone from no family, to a son and his mom and a new best friend to this whole sprawling family tree so vast and gnarled that it gave her a headache sorting it all out.

Like Regina. If she was Snow White’s stepmother and Mary Margaret was Snow White did that make them related? And did that mean Henry was her **uncle**? And what did it even mean to have all this family. Was she now going to have to do Thanksgiving with them? Or Christmas? Did they even **celebrate** Christmas?

Also when and why had Regina just coaxed a giant bird from a tree?

“Um, what’s up with the bird?”

“We need to send your mother a message,” she said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. And she really, really wished people would stop calling Mary Margaret her mom. It might have been true but she didn’t need to be thinking about it.

“I thought you needed an owl to send a message.”

Regina blinked stupidly at her.

“In Harry Potter they use owls…” She trailed the sentence off lamely as Regina’s eyebrows rose in surprise until she was so dumbfounded by the brief sentence she had to roll her eyes.

“Harry Potter’s a book.”

“Well, excuse me Evil Queen who cursed Snow White. How am I supposed to know what’s real and what’s just J.K. Rowling—“ Regina opened her mouth— “and don’t just say obviously or logic. **None** of this is logical and I refuse to be the one treated like an idiot when you’re the sorceress with a **bird** pooping in your hand.”

Regina leapt back from the ploop of white shooting out the back of the bird and cursed under her breath. The bird struggled in her grasp and tried to spread its wings.

“Damn it.” She held the bird as far away from herself as possible without letting go. “Would you please come tell this bird to deliver our message before it gives me mite.”

“You’re the witch. **You** tell it.”

She flushed a deep red. “I…I can’t.”

She had no idea why not talking to birds would be the kind of thing to embarrass someone, because it sounded pretty normal to her, but Regina was clearly embarrassed and Emma had seen her embarrassed maybe twice in her whole time knowing her.

“What’s the matter mayor? Got a… **performance** problem?”

She got a sour look.

“I’m told it’s perfectly natural.”

“Miss Swan.”

“A lot of sorceresses have this issue.”

She shoved the bird in Emma’s direction and its wings escaped her grasp, beating wildly in Emma’s face. She yelped and jumped back, which would have been fine, but her stupid boots weren’t built for traipsing through primordial forests and her heel caught on a root and sent her onto her ass.

God that woman’s insufferably smug face.

“Now, if you please?”

“How the hell am I supposed to talk to a bird?”

Regina just stared at her like she should **know**.

She stood up and brushed her pants off. “Do I squawk?”

“You can.”

“Really?”

“I could add it to my collection of ‘Humiliated Emma Swan’ memories.”

She shot her the finger.

“The bird can’t deliver that message, as much as your mother deserves receiving it.”

“What **do** I tell it?”

 

####

The only thing coming close to making her entire exhausting trip worthwhile was her conversation with Emma Swan. Seeing the woman that fully out of her very small comfort zone was immensely satisfying. It didn’t make up for her lineage or her breaking the curse, but between it and the time she accused Regina of embezzling it had almost made up for at least three instances where she tried to take Henry from her.

She was also certain the sheriff was so confused as to what she was supposed to do that she was about to poke a wild bird Regina could only hold onto with an excessive use of magic.

The nasty little things really did hate her. Her mother they were fine with. Every damned princess in the land they would flock too. But could they deign to speak to Regina? Oh heaven’s no. She was neither as frightening as her mother or as unbearably **good** as the princesses. She could turn them into a deli’s worth of sandwich meat but they couldn’t be bothered to deliver her message.

Emma was still leaning forward and looking from the bird in her hands to her and back again. Waiting to parrot Regina’s message.

She was about as useful as her mother.

“Tell the bird who you need it to seek out.”

“Mary Margaret,” she said. Enunciating the name like she was leaving a voicemail.

“Or you could use a name that would actually work.”

“That’s her name!”

“The name a **curse** gave her. How on earth would the bird recognize that name?”

Emma rolled her eyes, “Fine. Find **Snow White**. My—“

“Mother,” she supplied helpfully, watching the way Emma winced. She still hadn’t gotten comfortable with that knowledge and Regina couldn’t resist needling her with it.

“Right. Right. Please find Snow White, my mother and the psycho holding you’s step-daughter,” bitch, “and tell her to climb a beanstalk and steal a compass before Cora.”

Not very descriptive, but she supposed there wasn’t an abundance of bean stalks for Snow to bumble up.

“Oh and tell her we’re getting what we need to get back! And that I’m fine, I guess. And that Regina’s only being mildly bitch—“

“The bird can deliver a message, not a novel.”

“Again, how would I know this? I was cursed into a world where this would get us institutionalized.”

She really was never going to let that go was she?

Regina held the bird up and stared at it, hoping its minuscule brain and general birdish nature wouldn’t keep it from delivering the message, but she glared just like a good evil witch and funneled a little more magic into the creature just in case. The bird shivered in her hands.

She then cast it up into the air, where it beat its wings once. Twice. Three times. It soared back towards the way they’d come. It was nearly out of sight.

And then it plummeted to the ground like a stone.

“Did you just kill the bird?”

“Shut up.”

“Because it looks like you scared it to death.”

Her son was a clever boy. She really, desperately, hoped he understood the depth of her love. Because not killing Emma Swan was going to take every ounce of self control she had.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always feedback is appreciated. And if you want to discuss the characterizations I’m going with let me know. I’ve gotten SUPER nerdy thinking about this.
> 
> There is a reference to legends you might not be familiar with in this chapter. Hopefully knowledge of them isn’t super necessary to enjoy.

She was pretty sure Regina used some heavy duty dark witchcraft to get that first bird. Because her own quest to find a bird to deliver her message took the better part of an hour and amounted to her traipsing through the forest shouting, and when she was sure she Regina couldn’t hear her, trying a few squawks. 

She eventually found a whole tree full of them yelling at each other. And it was disturbing. Because they weren’t squawking. They were **yelling**. She knew, intellectually, that they were making non-sensical bird noises, but she also knew, in a very weird place in her gut, that they were talking about her.

She actually understood them on some base level.

It was terrifying.

Almost as terrifying as how quiet they got when she called for their attention and asked for help. At least twenty sets of beady bird eyes snapped to her and she leapt back.

“Woah, yikes. Um. Hey?” She waved.

The birds hopped around on their branches, staring at her and waiting patiently. 

“So you guys really can understand me?”

One cawed.

That was a yes.

She understood that was a yes.

She wished Henry were there. He would have gotten a kick out of seeing his mom talking to birds and the birds talking back. He also would have used all his kid’s capacity for understanding to just **accept** that she was talking to birds.

Whereas Emma was pretty sure the bird thing was going to be the straw breaking her sanity camel’s back.

“I’ve never done this before so you’re gonna have to bear with me.”

She sucked in a deep breath and clapped her hands together.

“Okay. So I’m Snow White’s…daughter and I need you guys to tell her I’m safe and trying to find us a way home. And that she needs to go up a beanstalk and steal a compass before Cora does.”

Another one cawed and she was positive it was saying, “What the hell?”

“Yeah I’m not sure either. But Snow—she’ll get it because she just gets this world. And I don’t because I’m friends with an evil queen and talking to a tree full of birds…”

Her hands fell lamely to her sides.

God. She was going nuts. Legitimately nuts. She wasn’t going to have to argue custody with Regina ever again because she was going to be stuck in an institution for the rest of her life.

Friends with Regina? They could barely tolerate one another! Just because every other friend she had had merged with their fairy tale consciousness to become a whole new person (and in one case **her mother** ) didn’t mean Regina defaulted to friend.

And she was talking to **birds**. Exercising some innate magical ability that shouldn’t have existed outside of a Disney movie. It was real. Not tangible, but real all the same. She had magic. Clearly. Because as soon as she finished her terrible attempt at a missive the whole flock flew away leaving the surrounding forest eerily quiet and Emma desperate to think about anything but some incomprehensible power she apparently possessed.

She made her way back to Regina. The evil queen and mayor had taken the time to conjure a plush royal purple chair out of thin air. It was much more ostentatious than the austere decor of her home in Storybrooke and she looked ridiculous perched on its edge clutching something at her chest with one hand and waving her other at a fire with a steaming pot hovering above it on a cloud of smoke the coordinated nicely with the upholstery. 

“Is the message sent,” she asked, not bothering to look up from her staring match with the pot.

“Yeah. I accidentally sent a whole Hitchcock movie to deliver it though.”

“Your mother will survive. She’s been friends with those pests since she was a little girl. She held concerts with them. **Biannually**.” Someone was still sour about them too.

Emma winced. “Lucky for you I don’t think singing runs in the family.”

“A small favor.”

She waved her hand casually and the fire went out, the pan gently coming to rest in the ashes.

“When did you find time to go to a Cabela’s for all the camping equipment?”

“I didn’t.”

“You just conjured all this out of thin air?”

“The chair and pot and fire, yes.” Like it was natural.

Emma gave the horse a wide berth and squatted down next to the pot.

She was boiling water. The steam had almost no smell beyond a slightly sweet one that could have just been from grass. She’d kind of been hoping for actualy food. “Right now you’re…what?

Regina was very matter of fact, “Steaming my buns.”

Emma tried to work out a comment but came up with nothing that would have been appropriate beyond the age of nine.

The sorceress didn’t even look up. “Don’t be an idiot Ms. Swan.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I said buns and you are **five**.”

“Nine.” She reached for the lid and Regina’s slapped her hand away just as she lifted it. “Where the hell did you get Chinese food in the middle of an apocalyptic fairytale waste land?”

“It’s Middle Kingdom.”

“That’s just a literal translation for the Mandarin name of China.”

Score one for the bounty hunter people always assumed was stupid! Regina’s mouth actually dropped open like the muscles in her jaw stopped working. Emma wanted to savor the moment but instead took the opportunity to open the pot and fish out a very nice looking whole wheat mantou. She bit into the chewy bread with relish, noisily enjoying it while Regina stared.

“You’re impressed. It’s okay,” she said with more than a little pride lacing her words, “fluency in Mandarin and an appreciation for Northern Chinese cuisine probably isn’t too common in town nobody’s left in thirty years.”

When Regina finally found her words again she was incredulous, “You speak Mandarin?”

She plucked another bun out of the pot. “Yup. Spent two years in China hunting this bounty. I was pretty much just paid in food and I came out of it poorer than I’d gone in, but I have a lifetime supply of tickets to an opera in Beijing and a fluency in the native tongue.”

She was, perhaps, a little seductive with how she said native tongue, letting the syllables roll past her lips. But it was rare she got to so thoroughly dumbfound the mayor and she was enjoying it. Also Regina was in such a state of shock she didn’t realize Emma was eating most of the buns.

And they were delicious. Chewy and with a sweet wheat flavor. After chimera and weird berries it was nice to have something familiar. Even if it took her back to being twenty, stupid and wandering Beijing with no money and no hope. Those first few years after giving up Henry and getting out of prison had been…unpleasant. She’d been tether-less and while it came to be a sensation she loved then it had only served as a reminder of how fundamentally alone she would always be. No parents, children or even a lover with a sweet smile and firm hands.

She helped herself to a fourth bun. They wouldn’t have been popular in Beijing. More like the ones she’d had in the countryside. “So the horse and buns. What’d you do? Rob a farmer?”

“And a queen.”

She stopped chewing, the bun turning sticky in her mouth. “Are you serious?”

Regina selected a bun daintily, her pinky raised like she was drinking high tea. “Food and transportation don’t just appear out of thin air.”

“But some poor farmer? This might have been their only meal for weeks!”

“Not after the Queen Mother tortures them to death in punishment.” She bit into the bun happily.

And Emma found herself suddenly without an appetite and three and a half buns sitting like a stone in her stomach. “That’s evil.”

“I helped them and they were planning to offer me up to the Queen Mother. So I moved first. It was survival. And I don’t really see from what possible precipice you could judge me. You were in prison.”

“Because I took the fall for my boyfriend stealing watches, not because I left some poor farmers to be tortured by some—some queen mother—“ Oh no. “Like the Taoist deity?”

She looked surprised, “You’ve heard of her?”

“Beijing. Lot of theater while I was there. And the farmer,” she shut her eyes, “please tell me he wasn’t a farmer living on the side of a mountain.”

“Niulang I think, but it was that wretch of a wife Zhinu that was the real problem.”

She had to pinch the bridge of her nose to fight back the horror induced migraine. “You betrayed two of the most famous lovers in Chinese folklore for some horses and steamed buns?”

“They’re **magic** horses.”

“They’re Zhinu and Niulang!”

Regina just gave her a blank look.

“They have a holiday in China. It’s the most romantic holiday in a country of more than a billion people.”

Regina finished her first bun.

“That’s like getting Superman and Lois Lane to divorce—never mind. Look who I’m talking to. The Evil Queen who cursed Snow White and Prince Charming.”

Regina rolled her eyes. 

“You’d probably kill the white snake before she meets Xu Xian,” Emma muttered.

Regina reached into the pot and took another bun. Conversationally she said, “I’m surprised Sheriff. This is the most learned you’ve appeared to be in the entire time I’ve known you.”

“That’s because we usually talk about you being psychotic. Mary Margaret being psychotic. Or Henry. Not a lot of time for me to give you what is apparently a very necessary lesson in Chinese folklore.”

“I’ll be sure to remember you if I ever have to make another trip there.”

“Do you even feel a little guilty?”

“No,” she responded immediately. 

Emma didn’t need her untrustworthy “super power” to tell her that was a big fat lie.

“And they’ll be fine. She’ll yell, maybe whip them a few times and separate them.”

“She turns them into stars and sets them in the sky and allows them to see one another once every seven years. They could have been together if you hadn’t betrayed them.”

“A lifetime in the stars is a much better fate than a lot of people. Like the stable boy your mother killed. Or the myriad of soldiers she and Charming slaughtered to be together.”

“I have a hard time believing Snow White’s some ruthless murderer.”

“No dear. Just a killer.”

“And what are you?”

“A much more successful one,” she said with no small amount of arrogance.

 

####

They gave Gauvin a rest. Loosening his tack and guiding him by the reins while they moved on foot. It had been a good move for the sheriff as well. She had the wide legged gait of the saddle sore and Regina constantly asked her if she was okay just to watch the wince of discomfort play across her face.

It was a queer thing being in Emma Swan’s company. Their interactions had always had a purpose. One or both of them had come to the conversation with a goal in mind. Making the trek to Bluebeard’s castle there was nothing specific to talk about, and neither of them were the sort to engage in small talk.

Sometimes the silence would be broken by a question. Regina asking about Emma’s saddle soreness. Or Emma asking about the flora, fauna or history of the land.

“Didn’t Snow tell you?”

“It wasn’t exactly a guided tour.”

She’d found that hard to believe. Snow **delighted** in explaining things. She was a natural teacher. It was why she’d spent twenty-eight years almost content educating the same set of fourth graders day in and out.

“You didn’t ask her did you?”

Emma frowned. “It’s awkward okay. She’s apparently my mom but I still think of her as Mary Margaret and she’s just so—”

“Nice?”

“Yes!” But Emma’s elation was short-lived. “What does it say about me that I just agreed with the Evil Queen?”

“It says you’re a realist dear.”

“No,” she grabbed Regina by the arm and forced her to face her, “you don’t get to couch all the evil you committed in ‘realism’ Regina. I’m **plenty** realist and I don’t kill people.”

She raked her eyes of the woman. Daring her to disagree. “Perhaps you’ve just never been pushed far enough.”

Only Emma’s thin lips (a clear family trait) pressed together firmly. “I have.” It was a grimace, Regina realized. Something thoughtful from a woman who usually acted first. “There are at least three times off the top of my head murder would have been easier, but it’s not what **good** people do.”

She scoffed. “Evil’s easy then? Is that what you’re saying?”

Emma groaned and ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t know **what** I’m saying.”

“Clearly.”

“Look you are evil right? We can agree on that?” Instead of waiting for Regina to protest Emma forged ahead, ticking off items on her finger. “You killed someone you love to curse everyone, you basically stalked my parents, if Henry’s book is right you were an asshole to a whole lot of people because it **amused** you,” she stepped towards her, putting the four fingers in Regina’s face, close enough that she couldn’t look away without moving, “and you made our son think he was crazy.”

His accusation was the rare conversation to haunt Regina. It chased after her in every dream and stalked her in her waiting moments. “The way you treated me wasn’t an accident.” No, not an accusation. The truth from the lips of a child.

She tried to hold Emma’s gaze, but her son’s eyes glared back at her, verdant green and fearful and angry all at once. She looked away. “It was all I could do.”

“Because of the curse.”

How quick would Emma be to judge if she’d been pushed as far? If she’d had everything stripped away? Had her every crime and punishment displayed for all to see? If all she’d had left was the salvation of a wicked curse would she really stand before Regina waving her four fingers of allegation?

Some part of her that never liked to lose reared up to press the matter.

But the weary woman wanting to just get home to her son turned her back on Emma and the conversation, tugging Gauvin back into motion and letting the sheriff have her one victory.

There’d be other battles, she told herself.

 

####

Henry was always telling her that she was inherently **good**. That there was something inside of her that was just better than everybody else. That her parents being these fairytales in love had given her a leg up on the rest of the human race in the nobility category.

It was kind of one of the reasons she’d been so positive the kid was nuts for so long. She’d never felt “good” lying to perps or punching guys in the mouth or stealing a car. 

The white knight garbage was just…that. Garbage.

But between having Snow White for a mom and feeling bad about calling Regina evil she was almost ready to reconsider.

Which was garbage too.

She had about as much proof as anyone dealing with magical curses was going to get that the woman guiding the horse and looking depressingly pensive was evil. But the whole point of evil was that they were so busy being awful they didn’t have time to feel bad about it.

And Regina seemed a little offended.

And Emma wanted to apologize.

She could have really used head Regina’s advice. She missed her. Which was bad enough. But the snark, intangibility and company without strings had been nice.

“So Blackbeard,” she said, shifting her thoughts, and hopefully Regina’s, away from the previous conversation. “He’s a murderer?”

“I presume. But we’re sneaking into **Blue** beard’s palace. They’re very different. One is a pirate Henry studies in school the other is a Duke.”

“That murders his wives.”

She looked skyward to tally them in her head “Eight of them so far. The ninth ran away and then snuck into my palace wearing a donkey skin. At night she’d put on all her fancy old dresses because fairytale heroines are **frightfully** stupid.”

“And you realized who she was and sent her home.”

Regina looked scandalized. “I realized who she was and hid her in the forest. Bluebeard is her father.”

“Oh.”

“I may be ‘evil’ Ms. Swan, but I’m not a complete monster. She lived in the forest until the curse came and then I put her in charge of the tannery in Storybrooke.” She looked Emma up and down like those girls in high school who shopped at the Limited while she shopped at Wal-Mart. “Should you ever decide to wear a jacket **not** purchased off the back of a truck I suggest you seek her out. Her leather working is exquisite.”

“Makes all your full leather body suits and riding crops?”

That earned her an icy stare.

“Why did you guys let her marry her dad in the first place?” That was something Emma saw in her world, not in the ones her parents were supposed to be from.

“The Duke became quite reclusive after the girls’s mother-the fifth one—died. He kept marrying these women who looked like her and Leopold kept hoping he’d find one that made him just as happy without considering why the ones that made him sad all seemed to disappear. Then Leopold died, I was stuck dealing with your mother’s inept rebellion and Jack Bluebeard married his daughter.”

“When you figured it out you didn’t—try to punish him?”

For someone so evil Regina appeared conflicted. “The murders he’s committed have given him power. One far too similar to my own for me to properly deal with. The most I could do was ban women from his lands and relocate them all.”

“So your source of power comes from the same place as a guy who murders his wives?” It was a knife to the gut, then twisted exuberantly. Regina didn’t wince but was clearly unsettled by Emma’s comment.

“How astute.”

“Magic I don’t get. But a lot of the evil you and this guy practice? That I have experience with.”

Regina’s eyes watered and her face softened. “As do I,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess you didn’t fall far from the Cora tree huh?”

Whatever unhappy emotion Regina had been wrestling with evaporated. “I just promised Henry I’d retrieve you,” she said angrily, “nothing about what shape you had to be in.”

“Pretty sure alive was implied.”

“And **I’m** pretty sure he said nothing about turning you into a cow for the next forty years. You would, after all, be safe and alive.”

Emma reared back in offense. “Cows don’t even live that long!”

Regina stepped into her space. “Magical ones do,” she exclaimed fiercely.

Maybe it was the argument. Or the whole damned adventure. Or the way Regina was just standing too close. Emma cocked her arm back and jabbed her fist into Regina’s nose.

She stumbled back, dropping the horse’s reins and cupping her face. “Did you just punch me,” she asked incredulously.

“You threatened to turn me into a **cow**.”

“But I haven’t.” Still holding her nose with one hand she wagged her finger, “You should be grateful I’ve agreed to change.” She sounded like such a **mom**.

But it was the wounded puppy face Regina got that leached the last bit of Emma’s angry irritation right out of her. At once it was a reminder that the woman **had** changed (because the cow threat was probably possible) and that she was, kind of, at least, human. 

Emma came closer, her hands held up in supplication. “Here let me look—“

Regina slapped her hands away. “I’m fine,” she said stuffily.

Emma let her hands fall to her side and worked the plaintive look that always worked on foster mom number four. It took Regina a minute. She glanced from Emma’s hands, inert at her side, to her face and back again. Finally she pulled her hand a fraction away from where she held it protectively over her nose.

Emma stepped into her space and gently pulled it all the way away, her fingers prodding the cartilage and inflamed skin. “Jeeze. Would have thought you could dodge a punch.”

“I was a queen and a mayor. Why on earth would I—ow—be skilled at that?”

Emma’s own thoughts went to Cora. 

Either Regina was psychic or they were on the same wavelength. “She preferred magic,” she said softly. “And she was never—“

“No need to defend her. She’s your mom right?”

Silence. Regina stared at her, hers hands resting lightly on Emma’s wrists.

“Empathy Ms. Swan?”

She dipped Regina’s head back so she could get a better look at her nose and avoid those eyes—warmer than she could remember seeing them before. “I figure one of us has got to be the bigger person.”

Regina opened her mouth—

“And that wasn’t an invitation to comment on my fat ass.”

Regina almost smiled. Her lips quirking up a fraction.

 

####

There were times Regina found herself close to liking Emma Swan. For being Snow White’s daughter she had a certain edge to her that Regina found familiar. There was an understanding the two of them seemed to share that went beyond their love for Henry.

Emma looked at her not with the distrust of one fearful of the Evil Queen, but as an equal she just intensely disliked. She never looked wounded like Snow or righteous like Snow’s many compatriots.

Yet as close as she came to feeling fond for the woman there was the terrible suspicion that it all wasn’t her. Henry’s locket had blazed with a heat unmatched when Emma had touched her. It had soothed her aches, invigorated her flagging muscles and set something deeply unsettling deep down in places Emma Swan had no business whatsoever.

She hadn’t just felt a passing fondness. She’d felt something more. Something far too pure to ever exist between people such as them.

Her hand wandered up to the locket. It was warm still. Filled with magic. Magic that was slowly leaking into Regina. Merging with the oily nature of her own. **Cleansing** it.

Somehow a locket of her son’s hair was transforming Regina’s magic and her along with it.

She glanced at the oblivious Ms. Swan. She was trudging alongside, her arms swinging wide with each step as a child’s did. Was the magic affecting her as well? Perhaps that was why they’d shared such a companionable moment after she’d punched her. Maybe it was why they still walked without needing words.

The magic was binding them together. Uniting them in their cause more insidiously than their son ever did.

She knew all that. She understood just how far the magic had entwined them, because Emma made a joke. 

And Regina smiled.

 

####

“You keep saying Bluebeard and Blackbeard are different and yet his palace is on the coast and surrounded by ships.”

It was the sleepy harbor of Storybrooke if it was actually in a Pirates movie. Ships were anchored up and down the coast. Some she figured where from the Middle Kingdom. Others looked like the old Sinbad movies. But most were very much pirate ships.

“Blackbeard never had a castle.” Like Regina knew.

“Suddenly you’re an expert?”

“More so than you dear. You thought he was a fairytale character.”

“He might have been. Maybe your curse—“

“Set him off course a few hundred years?”

“It’s possible.” She didn’t mean to sound tetchy but Regina could bring it out of her with a word. As long as they weren’t touching.

Touching led to smiles and getting along and Emma forgetting that Regina was a psycho crazy person who just happened to be a generally decent mom.

Regina turned her back on the pirate palace and went to work removing every scrap of leather on her horse.

“What are you doing?”

“You and I are sneaking in, a horse will make that difficult and leaving him out here in his tack is a good way to get him killed.”

She tossed the piece she pulled out of his mouth at Emma. And Emma caught it because she was awesome like that. And got a fist full of slobbery metal for her trouble. She yelped and held it away from her body.

The horse snorted.

Like it thought it was funny.

Emma tried to glare it into cowering but the horse had other ideas. Or it was just a horse and she was thinking too much again.

Regina pulled the saddle off with a grunt and flipped it over, resting it on her shoulder and looking very cowboyish in the process. “It’s not that bad.”

“My hand is covered in horse spit.”

“It’s still better than that.” She waved at the horse’s back. His coat was sticking up in odd directions and was covered in sweat. Regina held her hand out and a brush appeared in it. She traded Emma the leather and metal stuff for it. “I’m going to go hide all this and scout the area. You make yourself useful and give Gauvin a good brush down.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m more useful than horse cleaning.”

“No. Not really.”

She disappeared into the trees, leaving Emma alone with the horse and the brush. They stared at one another again.

“You think I’m more useful right?”

The horse farted.

 

####

It took nothing more than a wave of her hand to encourage one vine to grow. It sprawled out like smoke, consuming the grove she’d placed the tack and saddle in. Seconds after she’d waved her hand there was nothing but a tangle of leaves in front of her. Satisfied it was all safe until she came looking again she redirected her attention to the castle.

Twenty-eight years had altered the castle. The two towers inland had collapsed and even from a distance she could see weeds growing between the stones. The towers over the water had slowly merged with the reef below. It looked as though the castle grew out of the sea. 

Shanty towns sprawled out from the seaside. Imps, ghouls, and the worst of the surviving worst milled about like ants. And watched those foreign ships sail in. A large one, hailing from Agrabah if her rusty knowledge of boats was correct, was sending forth an enormous landing party of the nastiest pirates Regina had ever seen.

She looked to the castle and waited for Bluebeard himself to emerge and she was not disappointed. He arrived in rich silks at the head of an army of golems. The people scattered before him. Falling to their knees and groveling and begging.

Bluebeard smiled and patted them on the head. He opened his arms wide at the sight of the pirates and one rushed forward to clasp him on the back like the best of friends. Then he waved to one of the boats. A sailor whipped back the canvas covering it to reveal seven half-dressed women.

She sighed. Naturally. Bluebeard was a vicious misogynist. He’d probably run through those seven women in less than a month and add their heads to his rumored trophy room.

Simply approaching the castle as themselves and tricking what she needed out of him wouldn’t work. Bluebeard would remember her and how she abandoned him with the curse, and it would be…unpleasant.

They would have to sneak in. Sprint through shadows and avoid his army of golems.

“Nothing is ever simple,” she said to the night air.

It’s Emma, the air replied, always screwing thing up.

Now the air was sounding like Swan. Regina’s fingers darted down to the locket. The magic from it was getting worse. Putting a tiny piece of the sheriff in her head.

 

####

It was head Regina who spoke first. Seated on a chair just like the one the real Regina had made and dressed identically Emma made the mistake of nodding at her like a real person.

“People see you nodding at thin air like that and they’ll think you’re insane.”

She’d thought she was done with invisible friends after Regina rescued her from the centaurs.

“I’m afraid not. It’s very complicated. All the magical theory that explains my existence? I could go into it but I fear for that feeble thing you call a brain. All you need to know is you’re stuck with me.”

Forever?

“You’ll know when to let go.”

If she thought Emma was holding onto her she was nuts.

“Says the woman with an imaginary frenemy.” Regina stood. She picked at imaginary dust on her imaginary coat. “You should tell her about me.”

That was the exact opposite of what she wanted to do.

“She’s feeling something odd too. Remember how she smiled at you?”

She was suddenly right next to Emma, looking up at her with a soft gaze. Regina’s smiles always looked like she was about to devour prey. But the smile she’d displayed earlier, the one reflected back now on the face of her imaginary friend, was a gentle one that made the woman look ten years younger and seemed to destroy a lifetime of misery.

She turned back to the horse’s coat, dragging the brush along and patting his romp. “Stop it,” she said into the thick dark fur.

Her hand pressed into Emma’s shoulder. Her voice was in her ear. “You must tell her before it’s too late.”

She reared up and spun on the woman, “I don’t have to tell her any…thing…” the words died in her throat. Other Regina had disappeared and there was only the real thing stepping regally out of the trees and looking startled.

“Everything all right dear?”

“How long have you been there?”

Regina raised an eyebrow. 

“I was just…thinking out loud,” she said lamely.

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

She rolled her eyes and returned to finishing her brush down. She’d found a rhythm to it. Found it comfortable. Like mopping a really filthy floor. The horse liked it to. Leaning into her touch like a dog.

“How’d the reconnoissance go?”

Regina pursed her lips. Her hand flew to a locket she was wearing around her neck and she worried at it. Dragging it along its chain. “It won’t be easy,” she said finally.

“I figured that.”

“He has golems guarding the entrances and the population is very…masculine.”

What? “It’s guys only?”

“No. But the women don’t have—it wouldn’t be wise to be seen.”

“Couldn’t you just make us guys?”

 

####

Regina blinked. She had to admit she likely looked quite imbecilic blinking like that.

Who on earth did Emma Swan think she was? She wasn’t that tedious Dr. Moreau. She couldn’t just—just change people.

“Magic doesn’t work that way.”

“There are loads of times guys and girls get switched in stories.”

“Fine. **My** magic doesn’t work that way. And really. Who on earth would want a penis?”

Emma shrugged.

“You’re a pervert.”

“Not to have,” Emma waved down at her crotch. “I’m plenty happy with what I’ve got. It’s bad enough running without a bra. You really think I want to have to remember a jockstrap too?”

She shook her head to escape the image, but an Emma Swan in sports bra and jockstrap was a tenacious bitch.

“So if we’re not going in there disguised as guys how **do** we get in.”

“We sneak in.”

She perked up, “We’re going to be invisible?”

“That tricks difficult to do on the move. No, we’ll go in in a few minutes while it’s still dark. Bluebeard’s busy with his guests that have just arrived. It should be—“

“Not simple.”

“Just possible,” she said with an encouraging smile. 

Then she frowned.

The locket. It was still picking apart the woman Regina was and searching for something else. Some naive creature who valued hope and found kindness a strength.

She’d had enough of it. Without thinking she whipped it off and held it out to Emma.

“Here.”

The brat recoiled, “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s a compass.”

“It’s jewelry.”

“I made the thing to find you and your mother. I don’t need it anymore. So here, take it.”

“Why would I want it?”

“Because the only thing as certain as your family finding each other is your family **losing** each other.”

Emma scowled, but took the locket. Their hands brushed against each other. Regina’s delicate hands meant for crafting poison and Emma’s strong ones intended to wield a sword. A spark of magic flared. Incandescent. Breathtaking.

Regina yanked her hand back as though she’d been burned. Emma ignored her and held the locket up to eye level. She seemed, in the moment, to glow. The magic of the locket surrounded the woman. Embraced her.

Like Henry would.

Of course he’d accept her so willingly while prying apart everything Regina was.

Emma slipped the fine chain over her neck and tucked it under her shirt. She was oblivious to what surrounded her. Oblivious, even, from what dark thoughts she stirred in Regina by merely existing.

She smoothed the feelings down inside of her like a dozen wrinkles on a fine suit.

They sent Gauvin away and carefully made their way out of their bit of forest and across the open countryside before Bluebeard’s castle.

“Kind of out in the open don’t you think?”

“Not if we move quickly and you stop plodding about like a Clydesdale.”

Emma shot her the finger and then grabbed her leg and physically pulled it out of the sucking mud that had once been a field for planting.

Bluebeard had overused it in the twenty-eight years since the curse and now what should have been great orchards and high fields of sorghum had turned rocky and barren and, very, very muddy.

She shot her hand out to keep Emma from falling face first. Then the magic seemed to trickle out of the locket, over the girl and straight up Regina’s arm. She snatched it back and Emma went down with a yelp.

“Okay,” she said from the ground, “either help me or don’t. Being a jackass is just going to make this all harder.”

The sorry nearly sprung from Regina’s lips but she caught it at the last second.

“Hurry along,” she said instead. Snapping the tail of her jacket in Swan’s direction she forged ahead, stopping only when she came to the outskirts of the shantytowns.

Emma stumbled up behind her breathing heavily.

“I thought you were some great bounty hunter.”

“That usually doesn’t walking through that much mud. How the hell did you even manage.”

“Magic,” she said haughtily. 

It had just been a little magic. Most she’d been using to stay awake, now on day four? Or was it five? Without sleep. It had been easier with the locket. It had worked like a little generator and she’d greedily consumed its strength, almost content with the **goodness** that came with its use.

She had to shake her head.

Her own magic was waning fast. Too fast. Using it to stay awake **and** stay sane required a great deal of power. Perhaps more than she’d thought.

Emma looked at her funny. “You okay?”

She pinched her leg. “I’m fine.”

“Because—“

“I’m fine Ms. Swan. Now come on.”

It would have made a funny picture had someone come across them. Mortal enemies slinking between decrepit buildings. Clinging to each other in the shadows. The moments they touched were the worst. The kind magic of the locket reached out for her. Called to her. And she had to reject it. Drawing her own powers even thinner and tugging her closer to the promise of sleep.

“Regina?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re about to pass out.”

She shot Emma an irate glance and the sheriff held her hands up in surrender.

Even dressed as they were and being women it was easier to move then Regina thought. Perhaps the gender of Bluebeard’s little fiefdom wasn’t as one sided as Regina had thought. 

“Oy!”

It appeared Regina had hoped when caution would have been wiser.

Two pirates jogged towards them. Emma tensed behind her, to run or fight Regina had no idea.

She raised her hand. The magic she performed was easy enough. Willing someone to sleep had been one of her first and favorite spells. Just a flutter of her fingers.

Both pirates slowed to a walk then, as if in slow motion, fell to the ground.

The problem was.

The problem was.

Sleep.

An easy spell for sure. 

But one that used energy.

Energy it appeared.

Her eyes closed.

Opened.

Oh dear.

She’d used her reserves.

Everything

But Henry’s magic.

She needed.

Damn it. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

Emma and the locket were so far.

And.

Why had she given it away?

Damn it.

Damn.

Sleep.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every time you leave feedback—especially when it’s to mock the many grammatical errors, another sentence in the next chapter gets its period… Which makes it sound like sentences be menstruating all over the place. I didn’t think this through. But feedback is appreciated and welcomed and worshipped. Thank you for your wonderful responses thus far.

It was Storybrooke but the homes were all at least ten stories tall, winged monkeys haunted the skies, armored centaurs stalked the streets and Regina stood before a pile of hearts. They didn’t glow with dark magic. The rhythm of them did not drum through the pavement she stood upon. They were wretched bloody masses of flesh.

 Cora stood on the other side of the pile. Laughing. Empty. Patient.

Regina’s hands were bloody. It had soaked through her sleeves and was tacky between her fingers. Red. Redder than anything she’d ever seen.

She squeezed and there was a heart in her hand and Emma Swan stood where the hearts had been and there was only a hole where her own heart should be. 

It was in Regina’s hand. Inert. Rapidly cooling. She dug her fingers in and blood leaked from it. Oozed out into her palm.

“Don’t.”

And Emma was beside her. Her hand covering Regina’s. Covering that pathetic muscle dying in her grip.

“Don’t,” she said again.

Cora laughed.

Storybrooke shattered.

It was all glass.

Mirrors crumbling into ash.

And then Regina was awake. Shivering with adrenalin and trying not to clutch at her chest.

A dream. Just a dream.

Dreams were potent. They told the future. Illuminated the past. They were guides. Warnings.

Dreams were—

Something that only happened when one was asleep.

Regina tried to remember how she’d come to be fully dressed on a bed. There’d been the shantytowns and Emma Swan and pirates. She’d told the pirates to sleep.

Used the last of her magic. And then…

Her hand came up to her mouth in shock.

She’d fallen asleep in the middle of the street while trying to break into a castle.

Now she was lying on a bed and dressed like a pirate.

Somehow her tailored riding coat and pants, very expensive cotton blouse and custom boots had been traded for a waistcoat, men’s shirt, leather pants and boots all about four sizes too big.

And a hat, which hung on one of the boots, picking up mud from the sole that no one had bothered to clean off.

She didn’t have much time to consider how’d she’d come to be dressed in the clothes of a fat pirate or gotten from the streets to the hut. The door to the room jerked open. Sunlight, blindingly white, poured in, revealing a dank hovel with two beds, a table of rotted wood and not much else.

Another pirate stepped through the entrance and shoved the door shut with their foot, mumbling all the while like they were having a conversation with—

The pirate in the doorway was, in fact, Emma Swan. Only she’d exchanged her awful jacket and too tight jeans for an ornate burgundy coat, brown leather pants that somehow were tighter than anything she’d worn before, and a tricorne she’d tucked her hair up into. With the coat buttoned she almost resembled a man. 

“Ms. Swan.” She said the name imperiously—a bad attempt to reclaim her dignity while wearing the leather pants of what might have been the descendant of a giant. She had to gather them at the waist with her fist when she stood. “What on **earth** is going on?”

Her relief at the sight of Regina was unsettling.

“You’re awake.”

“Clearly. Where are my clothes?”

“Hidden at the bottom of a barrel outside, same as mine.”

“Okay.” She pursed her lips. “Why are my clothes there, instead of on my body?”

“Because we’re hiding from the crazy serial killer in the castle and two women out of a mall catalogue would be obvious?”

Fine. Regina drew in a breath through her nose to keep from yelling. Something she’d read in a book about counting to five and taking a breath. But something smelled… She had to clinch her hand into a fist to keep from unleashing a well deserved lashing via magic. “This is perhaps the most important question.” Her knuckles were white with restraint.

Emma raised her eyebrow.

Regina sucked her next breath in through her mouth. “Why,” she said through gritted teeth, “do I smell homeless?”

Emma shrugged and flopped down onto the other bed, resting her filthy boots on the table, which creaked under the strain. She set her package in her lap and tore at the paper. A sandwich of what smelled like corned beef and death was inside. She offered half of it to Regina.

She politely declined. “That’s food poisoning in a wrapper.”

“I’ve survived two of them so far.”

“Where did you get food? Where did you get these clothes? Do they have lice? They feel as though they have lice. And is this—“ What was on her shoulder? “Is this **vomit**?”

Emma said nothing. Just continued to chew on her sandwich like a cow with cud. 

It was definitely vomit. On her shoulder! 

She ripped the waist coat and shirt off, the pants sliding down her hips in her haste to divest herself of everything.

“And urine,” she protested. “Did you go out and find the saddest, drunkest buffoon of a man to rob of his clothes?”

“Pretty much,” Emma said with a full mouth. 

“I look and smell like Leroy fell into a Gilbert and Sullivan piece.”

Emma cocked her head and waved at Regina with her sandwich, “Pretty sure he doesn’t wear the lacy shelf bra.”

She would have blushed once upon a time. But Regina was a clever woman. Clever people had active imaginations. Imaginations that immediately conjured up the image of the hirsute dwarf in Regina’s shelf bra and bikini briefs.

“And in addition to the bleach for my body I now need more for my brain.”

“You think that’s bad. I had to see the guy I got it from naked.”

He’d probably had crabs too. Lice. Crabs. Vomit. She threw the shirt and jacket onto the dirt floor and kicked off the boots and pants, shoving them into the pile and as far away from her person as possible sans magic.

Which left her in her underwear.

Emma continued to watch her with interest while she noisily wolfed down her sandwich.

A cool draft buffeted the shack and spread goose pimples across her skin.

“Comfortable,” the ingrate asked.

“Can you retrieve my clothes?”

“When I said barrel? I meant the one everyone’s using for their—” she wrinkled her nose, her intimation clear.

“You threw seven hundred dollar boots into a barrel of piss?”

She shrugged again and took another bite of her sandwich.

Still fighting the urge to strangle the woman—stronger now that she’d given up the locket—Regina dragged her hands through her hair. The pain of her nails scraping across her scalp assuaged a little of the simmering rage.

She’d really loved those boots.

 

####

It was easy to forget Regina had magic. Conjured chair in the forest aside most of the magic she’d done had been below the surface. Stuff Emma could feel but couldn’t see.

Then she stood there in some pricy looking underwear, snapped her fingers and the clothes Emma had painstakingly dressed the woman in stood at attention, as if filled by an invisible body.

It had taken Emma the better part of an hour to get the unconscious guy **out** of the clothes without gagging and then get them **onto** Regina. Unconscious people were floppy and more akin to jello than a Barbie doll. It made putting their arms through shirts difficult.

Pulling the pants on the woman she’d actually broken out in a sweat. One that hadn’t been helped by head Regina making unhelpful comments about how Emma was a pervert for enjoying the view.

Which was just—she could appreciate a human body damn it! Just because it belonged to her arch nemesis didn’t mean she couldn’t notice the way her breasts swayed with every jerk of the pants or the way her stomach was really smooth and probably would have looked killer in a bikini. Those were normal reactions. Completely positively not pervy—

She tilted her head with interest. Regina was still standing basically naked in the middle of the room. Her arms were crossed and that sour look hadn’t left her face since she’d woken. She made a few slashing movements with her hand and the fat pirate’s clothes shrank. The leather waistcoat with the high collar suddenly had a waist and room for a woman’s bust. The leather pants seemed to cinch in to the point that Emma was sure Regina was day dreaming.

No way her ass could fit in pants that tight.

Emma knew.

She’d been awfully close to that ass hours earlier.

But Regina fluttered her fingers and she and the clothes were surrounded in a cloud of purple smoke. When it dissipated Regina was fully dressed. The vomit-covered white tunic had undergone a color change in the process and was now a **very clean** deep burgundy that almost matched the coat Emma was wearing.

The pants weren’t as tight as they’d been before, having been let out a little in the cloudy purple Wonder Woman trick and the boots—she squinted—they looks a **lot** like the ones she’d thrown away.

A choice she hadn’t needed to make. Regina’s boots would have worked just fine. But the woman had passed out in her arms while they were **trying to break into a castle** and she’d been pissed.

Though not as much as the shoes.

She snorted at her own joke.

Regina paused in her preening to eye her like a stray dog in the back yard. “Everything all right?”

“Sure. You done with the magic show?”

“I smelled like a vagrant and looked like—“

“The eight dwarf, Barely Functional Alcoholic I know.”

“Stealthy,” she murmured.

“What?”

Regina shook her head. “Never mind. So besides using me as a doll what exactly have you been doing for the last…”

She waited for Emma to finish the sentence. Emma took a moment. Relished the way Regina’s eye bulged. “Day? Not much. Actually scouting the palace and coming up with a plan that doesn’t involve winging it and then falling asleep in the middle.” 

Regina huffed and turned her back on her finding the barren opposite side of the room interesting. “And did you have any luck?”

“I’ve come up with a couple of ideas. I’d be happy to share if you can promise not to, you know, pass out.”

“It was an accident.”

“You sure you’re fairytale counterpart isn’t Rip Van Winkle?”

She huffed, “He’s not even from this land!”

Emma balled up the wrapper from her sandwich and chucked it onto the table before leaning back against the wall. “Okay. So what exactly happened? Because I’m not walking out of this hut with you until I know.”

“It’s nothing.”

She pegged her with a stare that made one bail runner pee all over himself. Okay. He’d been drunk. And on hallucinogens. It still counted.

Regina…almost…quailed. “It was my magic. It…ran out.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Magic is like—“

“A battery?”

“No,” she said with a frown. “I am neither a Duracell or an Energizer. More like a nuclear reactor or some other complicated generator. Normally one can expend a great deal of magic with little physical detriment, but continuous use, without the chance to—“

“Recharge?”

Regina gave her a bitter look. “Can affect the user.”

“So you, what? Ran out of juice? After a couple of hours?”

“After four days without sleep. I’m not some little witch who makes poultices for the town whore. I’m a sorceress of immense power.”

“With a dead battery.”

Regina snapped and Emma founder herself on the floor. 

Part of being a good bounty hunter was knowing when to press an advance and when to back off. She gave Regina the ounce of dignity she’d gained from her petty trick. “Point taken.”

Regina agreed smugly.

“Can you bring the bed back now?”

“Why? If you need to sleep the floor looks to be down to your standards.”

She tried the plaintive look that had worked a couple of times before on the mayor. Regina crumbled like a stale cake. A puff of purple smoke and Emma was returned to her previous spot atop the bed. 

She quickly hopped off and yanked off the mattress. Relief flooded her system, “Oh thank God.”

 

####

Regina had to admit to a modicum of curiosity. The sheriff had leapt off the bed as though it were aflame and whipped off the mattress. She’s sagged in relief when she’d spied whatever she’d hidden in the frame.

“Everything intact?”

Emma dipped her foot into the frame and prodded something. “I think so. How bad does that magic trick affect a guy I keep knocking unconscious?”

Did she just—? Regina stepped closer, wrapping her arms around her middle protectively and peering over the sheriff’s shoulder to find a scrawny naked man expertly bound with rope and passed out. 

Not quite sure what to say under the circumstances Regina asked the first question that popped into her head, “How many times have you knocked him out?”

Emma shrugged, “Four?”

“You didn’t think to drug him?”

“I left my Rohypnol in my other pants,” she snapped.

Regina went to her pack, mercifully saved from the water grave her clothes had been consigned to, and rooted around. She allowed herself some relief to find the peach magically preserved and still in its silk purse. But it was the leather pouch resting on top of it she was interested in.

She pulled it out and laid it on the table.

“Find some water, preferably not infested with parasites.”

“Is that—“

She opened the pouch. They were herbs, weeds and many plants in between. A small apothecary’s worth of greenery. Most of it was from her garden at home, but some were plants she’d obtained since returning to the Enchanted Forest.

Emma was still gaping at her.

“Well?”

The woman tried to form words, her mouth failed her and she shrugged, grabbing her hat and dropping it on her head before tromping out of the hovel in a huff.

Regina took a breath.

Let the solitude settle over her.

She blew on her fingers then directed them at the table. Crafting a mortar and pestle from thin air was delicate work. It was the forging of molecules. Stacking them one on the other until something tangible formed.

The chair in the woods had been easy. She’d had the stones and the trees for raw supplies. In the hovel she had just dust and air.

Purple smoke gathered on the table. She let her fingers dance in the breeze. They drew the mortar and pestle within the smoke. It faded and she reached out to touch her work. The stone was cool to the touch and felt solid enough.

She divvied up the herbs needed and ground them. It was a familiar task. One she’d done thousands of times in Rumpelstiltskin’s lair. There was a way to twist and press. Twist and press.

“I think if you grind that any more there won’t be anything left.” 

She startled at the presence of Emma Swan looming over her shoulder. Regina had been so entranced by her work she hadn’t heard the woman’s return.

Emma just nodded, for once not taking the low hanging fruit. She set a bucket of water gingerly on the table. “Got it from a well. I was **told** it was clean.”

Regina leaned into eye it, “I suspect I’ve contracted dysentery just looking at it.”

“And yet still safer to drink than the beer.”

“They have beer?”

“It’s a shanty town full of pirates. There’s a bar in every other hovel.”

“And I supposed you’ve sampled the wares?”

“Getting the lay of the land. Kind of important when you’re casing a place to rob.”

Regina rolled her eyes. Always, it seemed, luck was on her side. Her son’s birth mother **would** be the sort familiar enough with breaking and entering to use a phrase like “casing the joint” casually. 

Swan caught her scoffing and sighed. Mindful of the herbs she took a seat on the table and leaned down to look Regina in the eye. “Here’s the thing your majesty.” The title was a barb coming from her lips. Her eyes were flint-like. Hard. She exuded that confident seriousness Regina had seen only a few times—when the woman wasn’t being unsettled by talks of magic and curses and parenthood. “Sorcerers in castles and centaurs and ruining young lovers’ lives may be your thing? But this is my wheelhouse. I’ve spent most of my life either living with losers like the ones outside or putting them in jail.”

“How fortunate am I to have **you** on **my** side.” 

She shrugged. The seriousness that had aged her features and given Regina a brief glimmer of what the daughter of Snow White might have been bled off her shoulders.

“Just trust me on how to deal with them and,” she leaned down so far she had to place her hand on Regina’s wrist to stay upright. The pads of her fingers were foreign and familiar all at once on Regina’s skin. The charge of the locket’s magic sparked between them. “And maybe trust me on how to keep us alive?”

In an instant Regina’s hand was wrapped around Swan’s. She tugged her down close so there would be no mistaking the menace she intended, “I make it a habit not to trust people when their sole purpose in life is to destroy what I love.”

“You really think that’s why I’m here,” she said softly. Her voice too intimate for comfort.

Regina wondered if Emma saw the moment of indecision she felt. Did it reflect on her face? Shine light on the dark corners she preferred remain in shadows?

She squeezed in the vain hope that if Emma Swan had seen something it was forgotten with the bite of her nails into her wrist.

“I know it.”

 

####

Regina Mills had spent twenty-eight years living a lie. When lying went on that long, when the fear of being caught lasted a lifetime, it warped a person. Emma had seen it before. Fugitives couldn’t run forever. Sooner or later it ate at their souls.

Had it consumed Regina’s?

Her eyes were fervent. Hungry and angry. She was a creature a breath away from feral.

But for a moment—just a moment—Emma saw some other woman. The one that had pulled her close on the saddle and loved Henry profoundly. There was a human there underneath the monster.

And maybe it was being a foster kid. Maybe it was the years of neglect and abuse, or maybe it was the “product of true love” garbage. Any way she looked at it she felt empathy for Regina. A sense of understanding.

Because between the woman and the monster. The mother and the tyrant. There on the edge of all the masks Regina wore there’d been fear. A potent kind Emma had seen too often in the mirror. One fueled by doubt and misery.

She pulled away from Regina. Let the moment she desperately wanted to press pass. Her hands found the low slung waist of her pants and empty belt loops there and she hooked her thumbs through them.  

“You finish your poison,” she asked. 

Regina gave her a tight smile. “I did. I presume there’s a more corpulent nudist in the other bed?”

God yes. She’d almost passed out trying to move him. She had to dig down deep and tap reservoirs of strength that she was pretty sure were only used when a mom’s kid was trapped under a car. Her back was still a little twitchy from the effort. 

She yanked the mattress off and joined Regina in staring down at him.

“I thought about shaving his beard,” she mentioned, “stapling it to your face for a disguise.”

“The curse I would have retaliated with—“

“Would have killed me. Yeah yeah idle threats your majesty.”

“Hairy palms Ms. Swan.” She waggled her fingers. “A particularly effective curse for someone like you. Goes all the way out to the tips of the fingers. Very coarse. Like steel wool.”

“And now I want to vomit.”

Regina toed the guy with her boot, newly cobbled via magic to cling to her calf and foot. “You could have just killed them. Would have been simpler.”

“Maybe with magic. Us mortals have to physically dispose of our dead bodies.”

Regina failed to hide her exasperation. She turned back to the table and added the powder from her little bowl thing to the bucked of water. Over her shoulder she demanded, “As you seem so adept at physical labor get down there and pry open his mouth.”

“You,” she retaliated.

Regina sighed. “Unless you have a distilling trap in that paint you call pants I have to do it via magic. It requires two hands.”

“Fine.” Emma slipped past her, brushing her hand across Regina’s back just to delight in the shiver of irritation. Squatting next to the guy she wrinkled her nose. “Wow. The smell is worse down here.” Like a porta potty without the chemicals.

“Which is why I suggested murder. Less concern for the bodies needing a chamber pot. Or food. Water. Live captives are very time consuming.”

“I get it!” She pinched the guy’s sloppy beard with two fingers and carefully tugged it down, grimacing in disgust.

“Actually hold his mouth open—“

Back seat driving— “You want to do this?”

Regina said nothing. Which was the closet Emma was going to get to an apology. She took a deep breath through her mouth, grabbed the guy’s jaw and cheeks and squeezed.

The bucket of water and mashed herbs hovered over him on another cloud of purple smoke. Regina’s hands started their crazy movements again. Her face screwed up in concentration. This close to the magic Emma felt—maybe not it, but something. There on the fringe again. A thin stream of liquid slowly—painfully—achingly—slowly rose out of the bucket. It glowed blue as it corkscrewed down into the pirate’s open mouth.

She held her breath. 

Regina bit her lip.

Their subject inhaled suddenly then exhaled a contented sigh. Regina curled her hand into a fist so quick her knuckles cracked and the remaining liquid whipped back into the bucket. 

She smiled at Emma. It was meant to be patronizing—because that was Regina’s default emotion, but it came off relieved. “One down,” she said, her voice shaking a fraction.

“What’d you do to him?”

“Sleeping spell.”

“Like Henry?”

“That was a curse. This is a spell. No kiss. No potential side effects. He’ll wake up in three days well rested with the exception of whatever brain damage you’ve already inflicted.”

“I think he’ll survive,” Emma said wryly.

“He’s not the first man you’ve kept bound and beaten in a bed frame?”

Emma motioned to the other bed, “Nope, he is.”

Regina shook her head and if Emma thought she saw a smile she tried to ignore it and any pleasure she might have gotten from amusing Regina Mills with a joke.

They made their way over to the other guy. Emma tried for conversation to beat back the thick silence blanketing the hut. “So the herbs and junk. You carry that everywhere?”

“When your son sends you on a quest it pays to be prepared.”

“With the fixings for homemade knock out drugs?”

“We don’t all punch our ways out of problems. Some of us prefer guile and finesse.”

“Because it was my fists that got us this place to stay?”

“Wasn’t it?”

It had been the money she’d found on the two pirates Regina had put to sleep. Remembering Regina’s comment about the lack of women she’d thrown on the little guy’s jacket and hat as a disguise and paid for the hut closest to the three of them then dragged them all in while the old guy she kicked out of the place stumbled to the closest bar for more booze.

She’d checked on him three times since then to make sure he hadn’t said anything. The last time had been while getting the water for Regina’s spell. He’d been passed out in his own vomit, a grin on his face and half a bottle of something held tightly in his hands.

“Sure,” she said. Let Regina think what she wanted. She didn’t care. “Let’s just finish this.”

 

####

After they’d dealt with the owners of their new clothes Emma purchased a bottle of wine which she insisted was the cleanest thing in the shanty town to drink. 

“And how are you so sure?”

“Almost no one drinks the well water, the biggest drunks drink the beer and the only guys drinking the wine are the ones who look like they’ve bathed in the last twenty-eight years.”

Emma Swan using logic. Regina should have assumed she could. The woman, despite dress sense to the contrary, had been gainfully employed as a bounty hunter and when Regina had allowed her to do her job as sheriff unhindered she’d displayed some aptitude for the profession.

She had to admit, however reluctantly, that Swan had some skill dealing with the people of the town outside Bluebeard’s gates. For all her talk of being a foster child and savvy person of the street Regina had just assumed she was like her mother. Quick with easy words and slow with integrity.

Emma pulled one of the greasy wrappers from the miserable sandwiches she’d consumed from her pocket and smooth it out over the table. Using a pen from their world she had sketched out a very, very rough approximation of the palace and surrounding area. It was…impressive.

Regina elected not to tell her that.

Emma motioned to the map, “Do you know where in the palace we need to go?”

She had no idea. When inside and past Bluebeard’s barriers she’d be able to find the object required with just a touch of magic.

“He keeps it hidden,” she said instead, “but inside I’ll be able to use magic to find it.”

“His stone guy things—“

“Golems.”

“Keep guard. I’m guessing they don’t take breaks. But a lot of guys from the town here get invited in for parties at night. We get an invite and we’d have plenty of time to poke around.”

“After first having an audience with the Duke. I would prefer **not** having to meet with Bluebeard.”

“So we sneak in with someone else. Slip away before the audience or whater. It really isn’t that hard.”

“They’re pirates Ms. Swan. They’ll notice two women just walking with their group.”

Emma rolled her eyes, “I know that. We can either disguise ourselves, or we, just a thought, make a deal with one of them? These guys,” she waved at the bed, “were pretty loaded. I got enough gold to bribe somebody.”

“And you have a particular somebody in mind don’t you?”

She nodded, “A guy arrived at the same time as you and I. Real famous too. Been missing for twenty-eight years. Only according to people in town he hasn’t aged a day.”

She frowned. That wasn’t possible. She and Emma and Snow were the only one who had come from the other side. “You think he’s from our world,” she asked.

“You tell me. Did you bring Captain Hook over?”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll be away on business for about a week and a half and updates will probably get hella sporadic until late March because of that. So fear not if there isn’t a post for a while! I have not abandoned the story, I’m just stuck far away from my computer.

She knew Regina Mills could be cunning when she wanted to. The woman had manipulated an entire town for twenty-eight years with nothing but guile and a little bit of magic. She’d broken Emma’s lie-dar more times than she could count.

Yet she insisted on walking out of the hut in her all black leather magically tailored outfit with the high collared waistcoat and burgundy blouse that showed off enough cleavage to be seen from space, and she… **sashayed**. 

“You’re supposed to be incognito,” she muttered.

“I am,” Regina said regally, continuing to stride down the street like she and her cleavage owned it.

“A naked super model would draw less attention than you right now.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Regina…”

She waved at the people they passed by, “Look at them Miss Swan. Do you see a single eye glued to my cleavage besides your own?”

“I—“

“Don’t. Because I’m very good at what I do.”

“Walking like that?”

“ **Magic** ,” she said sternly. “It’s a spell that puts me in everyone’s periphery. Unless I call attention to myself—“

She waved at her chest, “Your boobs are doing that for you! They weren’t that…out back in the hut.”

Regina flushed. Confirming that Emma was, at least, a little right and not a complete perv. “I have a persona to maintain.”

Emma raised an eyebrow.

“The Evil Queen is a costume. If I am, for some reason, recognized than—“

“I thought the whole point was we—you in particular—wouldn’t be recognized.” Regina said nothing. Emma raked her eyes over her smugly, “ **I** think you just wanted to go full on pirate wench.”

Regina scoffed.

“It’s okay. I don’t judge people for their life choices. But call a plunging neckline a plunging neckline next time.”

They continued to make their way through the streets. Between the lack of sewage, the lack of pavement and the sea they were really just runny streams of mud and other stuff that only **looked** like mud. Regina didn’t float gracefully across it as she had in the fields. Her boots would sometimes stick and she’d grasp Emma’s arm without asking as she pulled herself out.

“No fancy foot magic?”

“No,” she glanced towards the castle. “Bluebeard has wards lacing these streets. The less magic the better.”

“That why you went with the boobs and ‘periphery’ thing instead of just disguising yourself?”

“And disguises are unsettling usually.”

“Seriously?”

“My mother is a master of them. Used to stalk me as **cat** when I was a child.”

“Like how kids don’t smoke because their parents did.”

“I suppose.”

She caught again and Emma stepped in front of her two offer two hands which she gratefully took. “You gonna tell me why you’re so intent on seeing Hook?”

Regina pushed her away and trudged ahead. “No.”

“But you know him?”

“Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. 

“Boyfriend.”

Regina stopped abruptly. “He’s over three hundred years old!”

“Henry’s dad had at least eight years on me. And aren’t you, like, sixty?”

“Tell me Miss Swan, when your father shoved you in that wardrobe did he drop you on your head?”

“Sixty-five?”

Regina scowled. “Hook was tasked with a job he failed to complete. I’d simply like to know why.”

“There. Was that so hard?”

She got only sour silence for an answer.

 

####

They found the famous pirate in the largest bar in the whole town. It was a big two story building with actual stone walls. 

“Built before the curse,” Regina said.

There was a whisper of regret in the simple words. The first time she’d seemed to express any over casting the curse. Maybe because it clearly **was** an older building, but the ones that had surrounded it had all crumbled. Some had been haphazardly rebuilt. Others had old canvas sails for roofs. Most were gutted husks. The remnants of the empty world Regina had built.

But not the Second Wife’s Inn. It was filled with pirates. Almost all of them men. And Regina’s “periphery” spell worked. Everyone twisted in their seat to see who’d come through the door. They glanced at Emma, their eyes briefly wandered over Regina, and then they went back to their drinks.

“See,” Regina boasted.

Emma ignored her and took a seat in the corner. After she’d ordered wine for herself and Mrs. Half Invisible she leaned back and scanned the room. Four different men had a hook instead of a hand, but her money was on the guy at the bar with his back to them. He was clad all in black leather and hunched over his drink and every other guy in the place was giving him a wide berth. 

“I figured he’d be taller,” she said, jerking her chin in his direction. 

Regina looked over her shoulder to study him. “He is.” She then pointed at another pirate. The one Emma had ignored as Hook because Hook wasn’t dark haired with pale skin and startling blue eyes. He did not grin like he’d tasted the entire world.

And Hook. The guy she knew from movies and junk. **That** Hook. He wouldn’t have his tongue down another man’s throat.

Her mouth worked for a good minute looking for words. “Hook is—“

Regina sipped her wine. “Unconcerned with opinions?”

“But I mean—“

“He’s very comfortable with his sexuality?”

“He’s gay.”

“Bisexual.”

“That’s a thing here?”

Regina frowned, “Isn’t it everywhere?”

“Sure, in **our** land. But these are fairytales! True love and everything.”

Regina leaned on her fist and watched Emma with thinly veiled amusement. “Do continue Miss Swan. I do so like seeing a bigot unmasked.”

“Gay people aren’t in old stories.”

“So what…Rapunzel was rescued by a prince?”

“Wasn’t she?”

“And Achilles’ true love: not Patroclus?”

“Who?”

“And your mother and Red,” she grinned salaciously, “just friends for all the years before your father?”

Well, that—it wasn’t a kick in the teeth but it was enough to deflate Emma a little. “So…”

“So when Hook isn’t trying to sleep with every woman he’s ever met he’s trying to sleep with every man. He likes sex. And when you’re evil like us you’re not judged quite as harshly for the lovers you take into your bed.”

“Hook not the only bi-curious villain in this bar,” she joked.

Regina raised her glass to her lips, “I never said anything about curious.”

 

####

There was always something delightful about getting one over on Emma Swan. No matter how many times she did it there was still the same satisfaction in her bones watching Emma struggle to find just the right barb to respond with. Sometimes she did, but sometimes the idea of Regina having been with women short circuited the other woman’s brain.

And not in a terrible way.

But in a curious—Regina put that train of thought aside. That was not a role she would ever, could ever, slot Emma Swan into. She was day dreaming on that path. Exercising hope for something more than the pressure of Graham’s lips on hers and the filling of an emptiness that would yawn in her eternal.

She finished her wine and poured more as she attempted to school her thoughts as cleanly as she had her face. “Now that we have that out of the way,” she said officiously, “are you going to go lure him somewhere private?”

Emma looked offended, “You do it.”

“He’d never go with me.”

“And he’ll go with me?”

“Yes, because when you’re not acting like an idiot adolescent you can, occasionally, be charming.”

“True. But,” Emma turned to study him, “we probably don’t need to do any luring at all. See the bartender?”

He was pouring a beer.

“Of course.”

“He’s been eyeing Hook since you and I came in. The heavier that petting session gets the more he watches. I figure we’ve got less than five minutes before Hook and his pal are booted out of here. Then we just follow them and have our conversation.”

“You’ve thought this through.” She hoped how impressed she was wasn’t apparent.

Emma shrugged. Her finger traced the rim of her mug thoughtfully. Without an ounce of arrogance she admitted, “It’s a gift. Finding guys and getting them where I want them.”

Regina let the invitation for an insult pass. “So we wait.” She drummed her fingers against the table top. 

Emma settled back in her chair. “We wait.”

Silence.

“Do we really just sit here?” Regina was used to action. She was used to flinging Hook against the wall and drawing out his secrets on threads of pain. She was used to taking.

Emma ran her finger across the rim again. The metal cup hummed. “We could talk about stuff. Henry?”

“I don’t want to talk about my son.”

Emma ignored her. “He still doesn’t have a lot of friends.”

“He’s too clever for them.”

Emma snorted.

“What?”

“That’s what parents say when they have the weird kid.”

“You think Henry’s the weird kid?”

“Lady **I** was the weird kid. I know from which I speak.”

Emma refilled Regina’s glass and ordered another bottle. Their second. Regina hadn’t even realized she’d drunken her half of the first so quickly. The wine was sweet, clinging to her tongue and hurting her teeth, but the alcohol burned pleasantly in her empty stomach.

Which is why, perhaps, she smiled, “ **You** were the weird kid?”

Emma shrugged, “I bounced around a lot and was emancipated at sixteen. Not a lot of time to be one of the normal ones.”

“I was educated at home and **discouraged** from speaking with anyone my own age.”

“So you were the weird one too?”

“Yes.” She sipped her drink. “It seems we are a family of ‘weird’ Miss Swan.”

Emma held her glass up, “Here’s to the weird ones and the helluva a kid they share.”

 

####

Just as Emma predicted the bartender had Hook and his swarthy friend out the door in under five minutes. The two men’s booming laughter rang off the stone walls of the Second Wife’s Inn as they pushed themselves to their feet.

Emma wasn’t normally a prude but she averted her eyes when it was clear that she could probably tell which way little Hook curved. Regina snickered. “Thought as much,” she said to herself.

She **really** needed to get away from Regina. They’d started **bonding** and then, with Hook, they were even thinking alike.

Her.

And Regina.

It was nauseating.

“Like images of my bicurious phase,” head Regina whispered.

Shut up.

“Can’t hear you.”

Emma scowled and turned around to see if Regina followed her out of the bar. She had and she was frowning at Emma.

“Are you all right,” she asked.

“Yes,” the other Regina purred, “are you?”

“I’m fine.”

The other Regina shook her head sadly, “You are anything but fine dear. You’re seeing me more and more. Even when she’s by you. Even,” she stepped between her and the real Regina, her dark eyes flashing in the sunlight, “now when she’s awake.” 

Emma turned her back on both of them. She shoved her hands in the pocket of her stolen coat and trudged through the mud after Hook and his lover. Regina followed closely and said nothing.

Head Regina though…

“You should tell her.”

How did you tell a person you were hallucinating them?

“She’ll understand.”

She would think Emma was crazy. **Emma** thought she was crazy. How was she supposed to trust that a woman who hated her and was only helping her for their son wouldn’t call her nuts and have her committed as soon as their asses were back in Storybrooke?

“She’s more than you think.” Like that explained everything.

Emma huffed loudly. Why the hell couldn’t the Regina in her head be on her side? Why did she have to defend the woman next to her? Emma needed someone on her side. She needed someone familiar. Comforting.

“She is.”

The real Regina couldn’t be.

“Because you like the way her stomach looked as you pulled on those pants?”

Because a lot of reasons.

“Tell her dear.”

No.

“Tell her.”

Go to hell!

“Emma!”

“What,” she shouted. And there was only one Regina there, startled and standing close, her hand curled around Emma’s bicep and half tugging her down an alley. 

She let herself be dragged the rest of the way. Regina shoved her against the side of a shack and stepped so close their thighs touched. “What is your problem?”

She looked away, “Nothing.”

“You were screaming.”

“I was not.”

“Maybe not out loud.”

What—“You can read my mind now?”

Regina looked baffled, “Of course not. But your were projecting. It was difficult not to hear it.”

Emma said nothing.

Regina’s eyes traced her. Looked over her. Top to bottom and back up again. Her gaze settled on Emma’s chest and the locket felt like ice suddenly. Emma gasped.

Regina’s eyes narrowed.

Shrewd fingers slipped between the buttons of her coat. Found the warm flesh beneath, were cool like death against it. Fingers grazed over the locket. Waves of ice so cold it burned cascaded over Emma and she had to shut her eyes against it.

“Stop,” she gasped.

But Regina was in another place. One of pure focus. The place she’d been in the cave when magic had burst out of Emma and surprised them both. She squinted in concentration.

And the ice was still there. Forcing her to feel it. Forcing her to stare into the abyss of its coldness. There was no Regina in her head to draw attention away. Or centaurs. Or Regina holding her close on the back of a horse. Just that locket. Ice. Moving through her veins. Magic demanding she acknowledge it.

And Regina.

God.

Regina.

“Please,” she whispered. And she thought her voice sounded broken.

Regina blinked. The scrutiny she’d applied to the locket still hidden beneath Emma’s coat was applied to Emma herself. “You’re wearing it?”

“It’s a part of Henry isn’t it?”

Regina reached up to lay her other hand against Emma’s forehead. “It must be amplifying what little magic you have. That’s why I could hear you. How do you feel?”

“Cold.” She glared at Regina. “And a little violated in the personal space area.”

Regina yanked both of her hands away and wiped them on her pants like they were filthy. “Right. Yes. So Hook.”

“Hook.”

 

####

They gave Hook his privacy. Regina tried not to kick at crates on the docks out of boredom and Emma leaned against a particularly large box and fingered the disturbing locket around her neck. The privacy thing was her idea. “We want as few people knowing about us as possible right?”

That was true enough. “I could turn his friend into a rat.”

“Not on option Regina.”

So they waited on the docks while Hook enjoyed himself on his ship.

Emma sighed wistfully at one point.

“Jealous?”

She shot her the finger. “Wait. Who are you to talk? When’s the last time you slept with anyone?”

“Fair enough.” The chill of Graham jumped to mind. The satisfaction. The awful emptiness of him in her bed and him walking away. Always empty. Always cold. 

“I miss him too,” she said. As though she were psychic.

Regina glanced sideways at her, “You barely knew Graham.” Her voice was frigid. He’d been coldest in the end. When his heart was ash and his body in the ground.

Emma shook her head, “Whatever Madam Mayor.” There was defeat there. A rare quality found in the other woman. Too often linked to the men that had come between them. The one sacrificed for a little more time in the curse. And the one destined to help break it.

Maybe it was the locket amplifying Emma and projecting the purity that had unnerved Regina enough to give the thing up, but she sighed. “You know I’m not anymore. Your father decided it was best I step down. I spent the last two weeks cleaning out my office and pruning my apple tree.”

“You just did it because David, the animal shelter volunteer, told you to?”

“He’s a prince. And…Henry did too.”

“Henry’s ten. In his head you’re evil beyond redemption or something and I’m a white knight who can do no wrong.”

“You’re saying you’ve done bad things Miss Swan?”

“I went to jail for some of it.”

For stolen watches. How was that as evil as crushing Graham’s heart or carving her father’s from his body?

“And some of it I got away with,” she said quietly. Her green eyes stared out at the sea where the sun destroyed all shadows and the sky fell down to meet the water on the horizon. 

“You’re still Henry’s savior. The town’s too.”

Her eyes were hard when they flickered over to Regina. “Then that makes you their villain.”

“Those are the roles we’ve been cast in.”

Emma rolled her eyes, “That’s such bullshit, ‘Madam Mayor.’ We’re not black and white and we’re not—we can’t be—a bunch of characters in a book where the ending’s already written.”

“Destiny is—“

“Bull shit. Destiny is why my parents shoved me in a wardrobe. Having that kind of blind faith? What the hell is the point of that? What does that make us?”

“Actors in a play.”

She snorted, “Or slaves. You ever think maybe there’s a reason **Henry’s** book is missing the last few pages?”

“He ripped them out to hide them from me. To help you break the curse.”

“Or because maybe it’s time for us to make our own endings.”

 

####

Regina was the impatient one. Cracking her knuckles and bouncing her knee. As the afternoon went on she stopped and stared more and more at the boat.

“It shouldn’t take this long.”

Emma snorted.

Regina pulled her shoulders back. “Not a word Miss Swan.”

“Yes madam mayor.” In Storybrooke the title had been a rebellion. Everyone else used it with respect but Emma had always tried to twist it just enough that the corner of Regina’s mouth would twitch with irritation.

It was a lot easier knowing she’d been deposed. Just a reminder of what Regina Mills no longer was. She spun on her heel and charged towards the boat for the fourth—or sixth—time. 

Emma grabbed her arm. “We’re being patient. Remember?”

“I was patient. I have now circled back around to putting Hook on the rack and turning his friend into a rat.”

“Won’t happen.”

She’d kept her temper in check for the most part. Been more patient since rescuing Emma than she could ever remember her being. But just that one sentence. That command. Molten fury in Regina’s eyes. Something far too hot for a woman with a touch so cool.

“You mean to stop me,” her voice imperious. Henry’s queen.

She quailed. Her fingers twitched around Regina’s bicep. Then she held on tighter. “I don’t want to.”

She didn’t even know if she could. She’d be more likely to just end up a punching bag for Regina’s magic, but Regina had to know that she’d try.

The muscles beneath her finger were taunt. The cold in Emma’s chest was distant. The sort of creeping chill that wasn’t normally noticed until it was too late. And Regina’s eyes were fire.

But Emma held her gaze. It was poker and she was calling the former mayor’s bluff.

“Five more minutes,” she said clearly. “Then I don’t care how many people are on that boat, I’m going in and speaking with the pirate.”

She let go. “Thank you.”

Emma returned to her spot leaning against a crate. She felt a little like home there. The wood seemed to conform to her back and if she rocked on her heel she could play a song with just the creak of the boards.

Hook’s swarthy pirate boyfriend kept Emma from have to act on her threat. The man ambled down the dock tucking a bright blue billowy shirt into his skin tight pants. He looked up and upon seeing them flashed them a brilliant white smile. “What lovely ladies do I find here waiting for me?”

Emma approached and wished she had a sword or something she could have rested her hand on to make herself appear more threatening. “Keep sailing Sinbad.”

“You know me,” he asked in surprise.

She frowned, “What?”

Regina seemed to float past her, something raw and sexual coming off the woman like she was made of pheromones. “I suggest you leave dear,” she sidled up to him, dragging her finger across his shoulder, “before something very unpleasant happens.”

How the hell did the woman make a threat sound like a come on?

Sinbad the sailor man grinned. “From a beauty like you unpleasant sounds divine.”

Regina’s finger dug deep into his shoulder, “For me,” he gasped, “not for you dear.”

His eyes flickered back to the ship, “And him?”

“Do you really care?”

He held Regina’s gaze. Better than most people. Better than Emma might if she’d had full blown psycho Evil Queen unloading all that sex and evil about two inches away. 

He grinned. “Not really.”

He pulled away from Regina and danced around Emma, bowing deeply as he passed. “Enjoy that one,” he teased—or was it a warning.

“I will,” she said out of habit.

The sailor laughed and disappeared through the stacks of crates.

Regina stood where the sailor had left her, her hip cocked and her hand resting on it. “You finished?”

“Oh. I was just—“

Regina raised an eyebrow.

“Was that really Sinbad?”

“Probably. A good rule of thumb Miss Swan. If you’ve heard of them in films or books than they likely exist in a land beyond our own.”

Jefferson and his history lesson. “Just another world’s history?”

“Precisely.”

 

####

Emma wasn’t sure what she’d expected from a confrontation between Regina and Hook. Maybe more of the excruciating attempt at banter where Regina oozed sex and the other one grinned. Or some violent moment where Regina impaled him with a sword hidden in her cleavage and Emma had to talk her down.

What happened was much more a mixture of the two. They walked in and the pirate looked up from his wine with a grin.

“Back so so—“

But his words were cut off by the sight of them. He reached with his only hand for a sword just as Regina waved her right hand. The man’s own belt leapt from the floor and was wrapped around his arms and torso as quick as Emma blinked.

“Sit,” Regina growled.

Some unnatural force had him sitting on the bed.

Most people would have looked scared. Maybe just a little nervous. Hell Emma was a badass bounty hunter and the sudden display of magic left her sweating. But Hook got comfortable. Sat crossed legged. Smiled. “Regina. It’s been a while.”

“Twenty-eight years.” That imperious tone of voice again. But…playful. “I missed you.”

“I was busy.”

“I know.” The only chair in the room disappeared in a puff of purple and reappeared before Hook. Regina straddled it, leaning forward onto the back of it and forcing anyone with eyes to stare at her breast. “You were with my mother.”

That was brand fucking new info— “He’s with Cora!?”

Two expressions of dry condescension settled on her.

“Where’d you pick this one up?”

“My business. Where’s my mother?”

His teeth snapped with his smile. “My business.”

“No, mine,” Emma noted with outrage from the door. “You’re with Cora?” She was vibrating with anger.

But Hook was calm, “With is such strong word lass. I prefer to think ‘aligned’.”

“And you knew?”

Regina was too, “I suspected,” she rounded on Hook, “you were supposed to **kill** her Killian. Not befriend her.”

“Love I believe you both are making a great deal more of my relationship with your mother than there is. **She** promised me the crocodile. **You** promised me a curse.”

“Where we’d be immortal and you could kill him when you pleased!”

“Only I wouldn’t have my memory would I? How’m I supposed to kill him if I can’t even remember the bastard?” 

A fair enough point from where Emma was standing. Regina’s shoulders sank. “Not everyone forgot,” she said. Her voice somehow subdued and contentious. 

“And I would have been one of them?”

Not contentious or subdued. Regina was a viper and she’d been rearing back. Her lips curled into as malicious a smile as Emma had ever seen. Then she struck. “I suppose you’ll never know,” she crowed.

There was silence then. Regina had won some battle between her and the pirate and there was only the sound of the water against the side of the boat.

“Okay,” she approached them both carefully, “so that’s out of the way. Want to tell us where Queen Crazy is?”

“I don’t know.” Such a liar.

“So what? You guys broke up? You ran away?”

“He was sent on a mission.” Regina was still staring at him, her head tilted to the side. “She sent you to find me.”

“I have no idea—“

The belt tightened as quick as Regina raised her fist. He grunted.

“Yes.”

“Why would she send him?”

“Because she knew her daughter wouldn’t want to see her.” His smile was dark. Laughing at a joke only he heard.

“My mother and I parted on…unpleasant terms.”

He waggled the hook bound to his side by the belt, “She hired me to kill her.”

“Charming.”

“And he let her live,” Regina accused.

“You asked me to rip the heart from her chest, love. Difficult to do when it isn’t there.”

Gross.

Regina frowned. “She’s hidden her heart?”

“Apparently. My hook went in and nothing came out.”

Emma knelt next to Regina. Whispered in her ear, “Is she controlling him?”

He grinned again but Regina studied him. “No,” she said after a time. “They just made a deal.”

“The same one I’ll make with you.”

“And that is?”

“Get me to Rumpelstiltskin and I’ll help you.”

 

####

Deals. It was always deals. Leave Daniel and gain a kingdom. Banish her mother and gain freedom. Rip out a heart and learn from a master. Deal after deal after deal.

Save a savior and gain a son.

She was tired of deals. Tired of giving a little for a promise. Sacrificing much for an offer. She cut through the air with a slash of her hand. Hook looked startled as he was thrown off the bed and into the wall. The belt was joined by more from the room, binding him to the wall and giving her ingress to his heart.

She kicked her chair away and stalked to him, reaching through muscle and bone before Emma could react.

“And why should I do that,” she growled. 

Hook’s smirk was gone. Barely concealed terror had taken its place. A sweet sensation that rolled off of him and lapped against her fingers. She squeezed. The muscle beat pleasantly in her hand and his cry of pain was a song in her ear.

Who had the power now?

“Regina!”

“Why,” tighter, “let you live? What,” so tight it stilled a moment, “could you possibly offer me?”

Her lips were near his. Her face so close she could smell the salt of the sea on his skin.

He wheeze. Grew pale. His lips turned blue.

She relinquished her grip. Simply stroked the muscle in her hand.

“Well?”

“Regina stop.” Emma was beside her. The sheriff of Storybrooke with her commands. “Please.” And then her hand was on Regina’s arm and Regina’s hand was shuddering in Hook’s chest. A pure warmth smashed against his exquisite agony. Shards of his pain prickled like ice upon Regina’s skin and were chased away just as quickly by the bright heat found in Emma Swan’s touch.

In the locket.

“Please.” Again. Emma was begging.

Not a bargain. Not a deal. A plea.

“She’d have you live,” she urged Hook. “Give her a reason.”

“Your mother said you’d need to break into Bluebeard’s palace. I can help.”

 

####

One minute Hook had been acting like he was the shit and they were the toilet and the next Regina had had him smashed against the wall with her hand in his chest.

It was so quick—so violent. Like the first time she’d used her gun. Something she’d see over and over again in her head but which was an instant in real time.

And Emma was stuck with her hand on Regina’s shoulder. Trying to…to calm her or something. But the woman was like ice and leaching all the heat out of Emma. She couldn’t even drag the woman away from the pirate either. She wasn’t sure how the heart thing worked but she imagined it’d get messy.

So she had to grip Regina’s shoulder and fervently hope there was a little more of Henry’s mother than the Evil Queen in there.

Regina looked at Hook curiously when he offered to help them break in, “How?”

“I’ve received an invitation. You come in with me and then do your business while I keep the good duke distracted.”

Basically the plan they’d already come up with.

“Clever,” Regina purred.

“Now,” he grunted, “if you’ll just…”

Regina squeezed again, the tendons on her wrist flexing. “And what’s to stop you from betraying us—me again?”

“Your mother wants you. You want to get home. I just want the crocodile.”

“So you help us—“

“And you take me with you.”

Her hand was out of his chest so fast Emma thought she heard a pop. “Then we have a deal Captain.”

Just as easy as pain has flashed across his face that smile appeared. “It would seem we do your majesty.”

They shook. Emma stood still. Reflected.

Regina had made it clear earlier they didn’t need Hook to break into the palace. The pirate captain had been necessary for information, not for the job at hand.

“Emma?” 

They were standing about a table and Regina was watching her. Patiently. 

“The map dear.”

They didn’t need Hook. All the same, Regina had let him live.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heeeey. Back from the work trip. Things in this story about to kick into high gear. I’m excited. Are you excited?
> 
> As for Hook…I have plans for him so fret not if you're eh about him.

Shit.

It had been a year since Emma had worn a dress.

An entire damned year. Her birthday in fact. She’d thrown on that red one that made heads turn and waltzed into a restaurant and then stomped out of it minutes later on the tail of a runner. 

The dress had **not** made the move to Storybrooke. It was sitting in a storage unit down in Boston along with her tv, a shotgun and a jade swan a lady gave her in Beijing.

If she never made it back to their world it was all going to probably end up on that stupid storage show where they’d claim the dress was worth five hundred dollars and sell that shotgun for twenty-five because they were assholes.

Being in a dress again was weird.

Being in a dress with a corset was a first.

Being in a dress that used to be her pirate disguise was just…weird.

Hook licked his lips, “That color looks good on you lass. It brings out your eyes.”

It brought out her ass is what it did and Hook wasn’t even bothering trying to hide where **his** eyes were focused. Regina stepped back to stand next to him and appraise her work. 

“I do do good work don’t I?”

His tongue darted out again and if he didn’t stop with it she was going to grab it and throw him across the room with it.

Regina was only about two steps better. She had a finger to her lips as she considered Emma, but she didn’t look at her like she was meat. More like she was just completely naked.

Hook noted the blush blooming across her chest. “Bashful?”

“Annoyed. Can we stop with the Pirate Wench Barbie thing already?”

Hook’s confusion was ignored by Regina and Emma both. Regina snapped her fingers and another rush of cold purple Regina smoke plumed around Emma. When it dissipated her coat had been returned, only— “What the hell!”

“It’s tailoring.”

She tried to pull the coat closed, “I don’t think I can even button it!”

“I noticed,” Hook said, eyeballs still attached to her boobs.

“You look quite regal,” Regina observed.

It was basically a skirt and corset with just enough blouse to avert nip slips and the coat now fitting closer than her own skin. “I can’t—” She tugged at the skirt which felt more like four or five hundred. “I feel like I’ve got twenty blankets wrapped around my butt.”

“They suit you.” If Hook didn’t—

“And what if we have to run? Or fight? I’ll fall. I could die—“

Regina sighed. “Fine.”

Another snap and she was back to the leather pants she’d stolen from the pirate. Only— “My boots!”

Her wonderful boots, the one’s she’d splurged on and that had suffered with her through the start of this whole hellish affair, were gone. Instead there were big clunky pirate boots that folded at the knee.

“My calves look huge!”

“I was looking at other curves love.”

“Hook!”

He just kept grinning.

Regina nodded to herself, “It’s good enough.”

“I can barely breathe.”

“But you **can** breathe.”

“Remember love, you need to look good enough that I’d have you on my arm.”

Emma rolled her eyes, “Please. You’d take a vacuum cleaner.”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Have you ever looked at another human being without thinking they’re naked?”

“People do that?”

“Oh enough.” Regina clapped loudly like an irritated mother. “There are things I have time for and things I do not. Complaints about my tailoring skills and watching you two and your sad attempt at flirtation is on the very top of my “do not” list.”

Emma was—flirting?! That wasn’t flirting. That was conversation with a guy who made spring break frat boys look gracious. If Regina thought Emma’s idea of flirting was **that** then no wonder the lady acted like she was an idiot. 

“That was **not** flirting,” she insisted emphatically.

Regina just met her with a steely gaze—a wonder because she had brown eyes and Emma always figured you needed blue or gray ones to be steely.

Hook rested his hand casually on the saber he’d latched to his belt. His pinky stroked the hilt. “I wouldn’t call this flirting as much as a series of **ripostes**.”

Emma wasn’t entirely sure what that word meant but Regina’s dark look and Hook’s grin meant it was probably incredibly perverted.

“Enough,” Regina said again, more emphatically than the last time. She stepped close to Hook. “Need I remind you that you live because I **allow** it. Continue to try my patience **captain** and I will rescind your reprieve.”

The grin Hook had indulged in faded. His knuckles were white as he gripped the hilt of his sword, but he bowed. “Of course **your majesty**.” The honorific was poison on his tongue and the enmity between the two crackled in the confines of the ship cabin.

“All right,” Emma said. She carefully stepped between them and half expected the space to be burning hot. “Let’s just maybe focus on what we’re doing. Breaking in and everything.”

Regina blinked and a little of the anger disappeared. “Yes. Of course.”

“Well dear,” Hook said, now appraising Regina as he’d appraised Emma. “What shall you be wearing for this venture? As pleasing as you may look to most men that’s hardly a disguise to hide you from the duke.”

Regina was still in her skintight leather. 

“Bluebeard is a misogynist of the first order. I think he looked at my face all of three times in the ten years I knew him.”

Trusting that the guy was still unconcerned with women unless he was killing them was ballsy. “Can’t you do your spell thing again?”

She shook her head, “It has a particular residue that will be apparent in his castle. I can’t conjure much magic once inside without him noticing.”

Regina snapped. Her purple cloud enveloped her. When it dissipated she was in all black with hints of burgundy. It was a whole dress with the skirts Emma couldn’t even breathe in and a corset so tight she thought she saw a rib. A leather cloak with some kind of satin lining and a voluminous hood rested on her shoulders. Regina’s hair, despite being a very professional bob thing, had been pulled back into a severe bun and dark lipstick covered her lips while elaborate shades of black and purple had been applied to her eyelids. She was a dark and discordant thing suddenly and Emma shivered.

“How do I look,” she asked coyly.

“Terrifying,” Emma said flatly before she could think.

Regina smiled, pleased beyond measure with the response.

But Hook approached her like a farmer about to buy a cow. He circled her and Regina preened subtly under the gaze. Somehow commanding him to look while also finding satisfaction in the appraisal. 

He stopped in front of her. His thumb went to his mouth and he nipped at his own nail as he studied Regina.

Then that same thumb came out and pressed against Regina’s painted lips. “You look like an evil monarch I once met,” the flat of his thumb smeared the dark lipstick, wiping it away. His voice was intimate. “But we both know you’re no queen now. Right dear?”

He grinned.

Regina slapped his hand away and brought her own protectively to her face. It didn’t hide her snarl of contempt. Her other hand curled into a fist and Hook was flung back against the wall.

Regina held her hand up, the fist uncurling as though it were wrapped around something—like Hook’s throat.

“Regina,” Emma urged. She reached for the woman’s shoulder and found only the numbing cold there.

“You’d do well to remember,” Regina growled, “that the path to your revenge is married to **my** will.” 

Hook clawed at an invisible hand around his throat. 

“Regina.” She didn’t quite beg, but she liked to think just saying the other woman’s name was enough of a reminder. 

The hand relaxed and Hook slid down the wall and fought for breath. 

“Save your poor attempt at wordplay for someone else,” she finished. She shoved Emma’s hand away and stalked out of the cabin, purple smoke cloaking her departure and her clothes actually transforming again as she moved.

Hook grunted and rubbed at his neck. “Testy bitch isn’t she?”

“She’s a bear. You keep poking her like an idiot like that and she’ll take your head.”

“You’ll stop her.”

Emma shook her head, “Only if I feel like it pal.”

 

####

People always talked of the sea air like it was something magnificent. That Regina could inhale it and feel her burdens lift as a salty breeze caressed her face.

But the water lapping against the side of Hook’s boat was muddy with filth from the shanty town and the breeze had the sulfurous smell of a stagnant pool. It was a disgusting smell that married well to the dark thoughts roiling at the back of her mind.

Killian Jones was a smug prick of a man but something about his sly smile and his cutting words had struck at Regina—left her feeling ill and irritated.

And Emma. Emma with her warm touch and calm tone didn’t make it better. She made Regina weak. Pulled at the woman she’d become, that mayor with a son she loved and a life she treasured. Reminded her of the chasm between mayor and queen.

She dragged her fingers across her face, clawing at the cake-like makeup she’d magically applied. 

A wet cloth was suddenly pressed into her hand.

“Here,” Emma said softly.

Regina hadn’t even heard her emerge from the below deck. She looked from the cloth to the woman, who avoided eye contact so she could lean against the boat’s edge and look out to the empty sea. The breeze caught Emma’s hair and in the outfit Regina had carefully constructed from rags and magic she looked almost a painting by one of the masters.

She pressed the wet cloth into her eyes so she could see stars instead of Emma and scrubbed at the make up.

“Guess that’s what you used to wear?”

“Something similar.”

“Pretty gaudy,” she observed.

Regina peeked from behind the cloth. Emma was still looking out to sea but was frowning—apparently at the idea of Regina’s makeup.

“Did everyone do that?”

She wiped more away. “You mean did your mother.”

“I just want to know if I have to hit up the MAC counter before you guys try to turn me into a princess.”

Regina laughed, it held a bitter note. “Don’t worry Miss Swan. I have no intention of making you a princess.”

“See, you’re trying to be insulting but that’s actually gratifying.”

Regina cleared what felt like the last of the makeup away. Her face had that freshly scrubbed feeling. It was always so disparate when compared to the makeup worn by queens and mayors. “Most people in your circumstance would be overjoyed. You have parents and a child after having no one. And now you have a kingdom, a crown. All waiting for you.”

“Yeah it’s great, I had no responsibilities and now I have to save thousands and then go and rule them.” She kicked at the deck with her clunky boot. “Some fun.”

Regina twisted the rag in her hands and tilted her head. The sheriff looked very much like a girl then—despite the clothes. A teenager playing dress up. A child instead of a savior. “Why do you run from such power?”

Emma shrugged, “I don’t know. Why’re you so obsessed with it?”

“Power is freedom. Happiness,” she said automatically. 

“Yeah, if you’re a fascist. Did it really make you happy? Because you’ve had it the whole time I’ve known you and from where I’m standing all it did was make you so miserable your son grew to hate you.”

That wasn’t the fault of power. That was the curse. Its final price exacted from her soul. It provided a facsimile of happiness—even love—but it was fragile and fractious. Not like the love Emma’s awful parents had for one another. Their love could create a savior. Regina’s could only create more misery—a palace of cards that tumbled in the wind.

“I was happy before.” In the early days, when the truth of the curse’s price hadn’t fully revealed itself. There’d been a time when Graham’s kisses had felt almost like love and Henry had looked upon her with fondness and Gold had come to her office with a heavy limp and a desperate plea and Snow White had stared out at the sea so depressed Regina thought she might walk right in. It had felt wonderful.

“Right, but what kind of happiness was it? Because when I kissed Henry and he woke up from **your** poison? That was happiness Regina, and if you’d ever known it—“

She’d seen it ripped from her lover’s chest. But she cocked her hips and spread her arms to show off her dark gown. “I wouldn’t be this way?” 

Emma wasn’t amused. As quick as she’d been a teenager she was the savvy bounty hunter seeing through Regina’s plots. “Yeah, you wouldn’t be quite so psychotic.”

She laughed again, “Of course. You’re assuming an awful lot from a few encounters. Presumption must run in your family.”

“You know what,” Emma stood straight and held her hands between them, as if to ward Regina off. “I came out here because I thought Hook was being a dick and you needed someone to not be a dick. I was trying to make you feel better.”

“I don’t—“

“Need my help. Yeah. I get it. You’re a badass bitch. You cursed me so I never knew my parents. Poisoned your own son—”

“—That was an accident.”

“And a jerk like Hook rattles you but you don’t need anyone. Because you got that clown make up and boobs for years to hide behind.” She snatched the rag still twisting in Regina’s hands and wiped it roughly across her face like Regina was a child in urgent need of a scrubbing. “You’ve got your mask and it makes you feel powerful. But it isn’t power.”

She’s right.

Shut up.

Her touch was almost soft. Kind. “It’s just a mask.” 

It was the second time that day someone had seen so neatly through the fabrication she’d presented. The second time a foreign hand had pressed against her face and simple words had rattled her soul.

She’d fled Hook to hide the pain he’d inflicted but with Emma there was nowhere to run.

And the desire to even flee had waned. Emma was standing close and breathing roughly, that ring and little swan trinket heaving on her chest, and as much as Regina wanted to fight her or run from her she knew she’d been caught out and by the one person who understood her too well.

Emma wasn’t Snow White. The privilege of a kingdom hadn’t twisted her into a spoiled little creature. Regina had stolen much of Emma’s happiness, left her as fractured as Regina was. Two orphans even with the most doting of parents.

She stepped away and had to wrap her arms around herself to ward off any further advances from the woman.

“Why do you think you’re so clever,” she finally asked. Even as she knew the answer.

“I’m not Regina.” That was a surprise. “I just know you.”

Never mind. Impertinence ran in her blood. “That presumption again.”

“Sure. But it’s more than that you know? I see me in you I guess.”

She looked over her shoulder, “Is that a fact?”

“I see what I could become.”

So that was what Regina had become: a warning for simple princesses. Careful what path you tread lest you find yourself an evil queen cackling in the dark and ever alone.

She laughed again, because it was easier than anything else. Even false derision was better than nothing.

Emma tugged her hand through her hair suddenly awkward once more, the brave little savior quailing in the light of her own words.

“Come along,” Regina commanded. Every passing second more of the mask fell back into place, but this time it was not the Evil Queen’s garish one, but the imperious Storybrooke mayor, familiar and comforting. She’d lived as her longer than as anyone else, and it was that mayor that had beaten Emma Swan so many times. She was better than the queen and all her magic any day. Bereft of affection—an orphan forged by a cruel word. Cunning and sly and the one cursed to a frangible happiness but promised it all the same.

“We have a castle to plunder,” she said with dark joy.

 

####

The problem of doing magic in Bluebeard’s lair lay in his sensitivity to it. Like the Empress of the Middle Kingdom he was quite attuned to the little fiefdom he’d forged. Regina could not simply blast her way through his palace and she could not radically alter her own appearance. The magic required would bring him straight to her and as long as she was in-between the walls of his palace he had a deadly upper hand.

She had to fallback on finesse. So wearing that mayoral mask was appropriate. Regina Mills was a shrewd woman who’d best the Savior until destiny dictated otherwise. Applying that cunning to her magic was a simple matter. She enchanted a long cloak of leather and satin and pulled the hood over her hair, out of the bun she’d originally tried and back to its normal length. The hood showed enough of her face so as to not alarm, but between magic and shadows it hid enough that Bluebeard wouldn’t recognize her.

Unless he got close.

Hook’s one task was to see that didn’t happen.

Emma’s accompany Regina and give her the freedom she needed from pirates and louts so she could find the magic she needed. 

But first they had to get inside the castle. Hook with his leather and swagger and Emma and Regina flanking him.

“Hold me closer,” he said under his breath, “you’re my wenches remember?”

If she let him live until another sunrise it would only be by the grace of some god she knew not.

“Call me your wench one more time and I’ll take your hook and shove it up your—“

“Emma,” she interrupted, “keep calm dear. Sodomy outside the palace gates will gain us the wrong sort of attention.”

Hook grinned, “But we can try something later if you like. My sharp sword and your supple—“

Regina let a little of her magic thrum through her hand. It turned her grip so tight on his arm she thought she felt a bone crack. “One more poorly timed coquetry and I’ll use the hook dear, and it won’t be nearly as pleasant.”

He paled.

She loosened her grip and picked up her skirts so she could step lithely onto the bridge that bound the shanty town to the palace.

“Into the breach,” she supposed.

“Or close up the wall with their dead,” Emma rejoindered.

“Shakespeare,” she said in surprise.

“And I don’t even have a high school diploma.”

“You two done wowing one another with your knowledge of dead men’s words?” 

They were too close to the palace for her to respond with more violent magic, so she settled on writhing against him at the gates and plucking hair painfully from his head while he talked their way in. It made him and Swan both uncomfortable and there was a measure of delight in watching him resist wincing every time she tugged another hair from his head.

On the other side of the palace walls nausea set in. But not over having to touch Hook. It was being inside the walls of Bluebeard’s castle. Being right there within his seat of power. Hiw magic was…unsettling.

“Jesus,” Emma moaned. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything more disgusting in my life.”

“You do look ill,” Hook observed. “Jealous?”

“Yeah, of that guy,” she stabbed her finger in the direction of a pirate passed out drunk on the steps leading up to Bluebeard’s great hall. When Regina offered no quip of her own Emma craned her neck to look around Hook. “Madam mayor?”

She wondered if that was another slight against Regina, or just habit. She pulled herself up, letting the nauseous flow of Bluebeard’s power swim around her while she worked her magic on the cloak—drawing shadows about her and dropping dapples of lights on the important places, the swell of her breasts and the curve of her smile. Just enough to entice, but not enough to draw Bluebeard’s interest. 

His interest in her would be their undoing. He’d had twenty-eight years to practice his magic and his was the kind bound to his seat of power, while Regina had let her own skills languish so she could raise a son and build a town.

The theft ahead of them was going to be…difficult.

 

####

“Let’s go,” Regina urged. She dropped Hook’s arm and pressed forward, moving up the stairs in her voluminous dress like she’d done it a hundred times before. Hook hurried after her, too caught up to make some stupid remark. Emma followed after both of them, but took her steps gingerly. The stairs leading up to what sounded like a major party were wet from the ocean and way too narrow. She had to sort of twist her foot to the side to fit it all on the step, or do like Regina and Hook and walk on the balls of her feet.

They waited at the top, Hook with his stupid grin and Regina with the most inscrutable of expressions.

“Trouble with the stairs,” Hooked asked.

“And this corset,” she huffed. The thing was like a vice.

“Breathe shallowly,” Regina offered. “It helps.”

“So do bras.”

Regina ignored her and took Hook’s arm again, waiting just for the moment Emma reluctantly took his other arm before leading them into the hall. “You know your task Captain, try not to fail me again.”

“Always with the threats love. They’re growing boring.”

Shoot me now.

But the other Regina said nothing. Didn’t even appear. It was like she’d been replaced by the nausea turning her stomach into a twisted knot. Part of it had to be nerves—breaking into the palace of a sorcerer/serial killer was going to make a girl nervous, but it had also begun as soon as they’d stepped past the palace walls and it was just getting worse with every step.

Other Regina would have told her to tell the solid Regina. Would have looked her in the eyes and almost pleaded with her. Would have displayed compassion the creature on the other side of Hook usually seemed incapable of.

And other Regina would have had a quip on the tip of her tongue for when they stepped into the great hall of Bluebeard’s palace. Something about how overwrought it all was.

The place was like out of a movie. Actual **tapestries** hung from the walls and torches lit the whole room and gold shimmered everywhere. Long tables filled the hall and each table was loaded with drunken pirates and the wenches that had been missing from the shanty town—all drinking from jeweled cups.

And up on a dais, overlooking it wall, was the eponymous Bluebeard.

His beard really was blue, a bright and unnatural royal blue. The beard fanned out from his face and was greased into five long prongs. He’d woven beads into it and each prong ended in a gold ring. It was a big and magnificent thing, but Bluebeard was big and magnificent too. He had thick black hair and heavy eyebrows that shaded beady eyes that looked brown but sometimes almost red. He was dressed all in gold and black silk. It stretched across his massive frame, bulging around muscles she usually only saw in cage fighters in Arkansas.

“Hasn’t changed a bit,” Hook noted. Like the giant was just…normal.

“It’s his magic,” Regina said, “preserves him.”

“He’s huge.” He was monstrous. His eyes found them from the other end of the hall and the nausea increased tenfold. She had to fight her very capable survival instinct that screamed at her to run.

Hook stepped away. “You’re looking peakish.”

Regina came around and slipped her arm around Emma’s waist. Immediately the sick feeling flagged. “I’ll take care of her, go greet our host before he grows curious.”

“Right.” Hook stepped away from them and studied them both briefly before swooping in and kissing Regina like…well like they’d done it before. The hand around her waist turned stiff as Regina’s whole body went rigid. He tilted Regina’s chin up with his hook, “For show darling.”

Ice water prickled in Emma’s veins. She’s started to associate it with Regina’s magic—and more specifically the anger that seemed to fuel it.

Hook turned on the high heel of his boot. He spread his arms wide like he was waiting for a hug and his voice boomed as he made his way across the hall, “Bluebeard, it’s been so long!”

The big man’s words were lost in the noise of the hall. Which was unexpected. Emma would have thought he’d be as bold as his beards, but his blue lips moved and the words seemed to only reach the pirate.

“What do we do now,” she said under her breath to Regina, who was still standing stock still.

“We mingle. I trust you can do that?”

“I’m not the queen stuck in a tower or mansion for thirty something years.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, if you keep your temper in check. These are down on their luck pirates your majesty. Your regal act won’t cut it.”

“I can be one with the people.”

“Just don’t rip out any hearts to prove your oneness.”

“As long as more pirates don’t go shoving they’re tongues down my throat we should be fine.”

They parted, each moving in a different direction across the hall. Regina was like a snake the way she moved through the pirates, her cloak flowed like crude oil and she slunk between them, curving in and rejecting them all at once. The Evil Queen amongst her former subjects. But then there was the flash of white as a smile flashed beneath her hood. 

It was terrifying how genuine it was—and how nice it looked on Regina Mills.

Emma found herself slipping into a character too. Since Henry had come into her life she’d put aside the flirtatious vamp persona. Set her in a box and buried her next to the hard ass who could cross a street of busy traffic without a glance. She’d tried to be a mother and she’d tried to be a sheriff and she’d tried to be **good** and now she was among the pirates she was a coquettish bounty hunter who could flirt with ease and demure instead of challenge.

Henry would have been repulsed. Mary Margaret would have been confused. But every once in a while she’d catch Regina’s eye across the hall and see only approval in her dark eyes.

They weren’t so different the two of them, slipping into identities as easily as pulling on a mask.

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. March kind of kicks my ass due to work. But I’m looking at April and drooling over all the free time. I see myself enjoying spring afternoon with a nice hefeweizen and a whole mess of fanfic writing.
> 
> WARNING: Some of the imagery in this chapter is violent and gross. I don’t think it’s enough to warrant a mark up to M rating but if it is let me know!

It was her mother who’d warned her of Bluebeard. He’d arrived on a giant black stallion and taken Regina’s hand in his, bringing it to his blue lips and tickling her fingers with his vibrant beard.

“What a lovely girl,” he’d purred. But his eyes hadn’t risen to meet hers. He stared at her chest, her waist, even the point where her legs met, but never her face. When he did deign to look above her neck it was to peer over the top of her head with his beady eyes.

“I feel like Rocinante,” she’d complained to Daniel. He’d grinned and flung hay at her and they’d gotten distracted.

When she’d emerged from the stables later, disheveled and satisfied, she’d found Bluebeard waiting. Leaning against a post and sucking on a strand of straw and stroking that beard of his.

“Enjoy yourself?”

She’d shuddered at his voice.

“You can bring him if you like,” he’d said.

“Where?”

“To my castle. Where you will be my wife.”

It had been her father’s attempt at a bargain. A way for Regina to escape her mother and have a life.

“I can’t!”

“He’s friend to the king. A good man by many rights. Wealthy. He will treat you well.”

But his looks had churned her stomach and filled her with a dread more awful than even the touch of her mother’s magic.

Then Cora had blazed into the room and cast all the servants out and turned on her father. “She will not marry that man!”

“He’s a good man,” he’d insisted again. As if a simple friendship with a noble king could make a man something honest.

“So was your father,” she’d snarled. The long dead king who’d awarded her father to her mother like chattel. 

The mere mention of her grandfather had set her parents into a pitched battle that went past sundown. Cora had finally come to her room late at night, when the servants had gone to bed and the only lights were from the smoldering coals in the fireplace.

“Oh my dear daughter,” she’d cooed. “Do not fear. You will not have to marry such a man.”

Too elated to hold her tongue she’d asked simply, “Why?”

Her mother had plucked at the beads on her dress and looked thoughtful—a rare instance for her. Cora was a woman of action. She was quiet or she was moving. The moments she did think were fleeting, quiet and never in Regina’s presence.

“There are many forms of evil dear.”

“Is that what he is?”

“The Duke is something wholly different from all the other evils of the world. He is the basest sort but somehow,” her lips had pursed, “he has acquired much power and the cost for that power is…high.”

It was years later, after she’d vanquished her mother and learned all the secrets that Rumpelstiltskin had offered that she understood her mother’s fear. And it was fear. Her mother was scared of no one except Bluebeard.

“Avoid that one dearie,” Rumpelstiltskin had warned. “What he offers isn’t power.”

No. What Bluebeard offered was death. His power was rooted in it like hers was found in anger. He took the last breaths of his victims and created something powerful and impenetrable.

“If it’s so powerful why don’t more people do it,” she’d asked Rumpelstiltskin.

He’d lurched towards her, “Try it some time. Answer your own question.”

It was only when her father’s heart was turning to cinders in a fire that she understood. Years and days after she’d last considered Bluebeard she’d realized the cost of his magic. 

Blood magic was powerful, but dealing in life and death tore the soul apart, blackened the heart. Regina had cast just one spell using it. She cursed their entire land with the offering of her father’s blood. But Bluebeard had sacrificed more than one heart on his power’s alter over the decades.

It set rot in the walls of his castle and a stench only the attuned could smell. A cloying and awful thing there below the stench of pirates and food and drink. It was suffocating to be in his hall and in his presence.

Yet every once in a while as Regina moved through the crowd and tried to work her way as far from his attention as possible she’d catch the scent of something—someone—else. Clean. Healthy. A heart untarnished by darkness, a soul not blackened by spilt blood.

Emma.

With her worrisome…potency. And that awful link to the Charming family compass Regina had foolishly made.

The girl and the locket kept rounding up on her thoughts. Sneaking to the forefront that should have been occupied only by Bluebeard and her objective.

Come on Regina, you know why.

She refused to respond to that voice in her head. Turned her thoughts away from it as best she could. She just needed to steal from a blood sorcerer, recover her mortal enemy, avoid her mother, and get home to Henry. Then lockets and saviors and the problem they posed could be dealt.

 

####

“Go away.”

“But this is destiny little bird.”

“More like misery.”

“We’ve found each other again.”

“You were shacking up with Hook less than six hours ago!”

Sinbad smiled. “I was, and I taught him amazing things he no doubt yearns to teach you, but why learn them from him second hand when you have me willing and before you?”

Were all pirates as ridiculous as Sinbad and Hook? She’d been perfectly fine. She’d ingratiated herself pretty damned well and Bluebeard didn’t seem to pay as much attention as he had when they’d walked in and it was all going just how it should.

Then the stupid sailor man found her and ramped the seduction up to eleven.

“If you think I’m sleeping with Hook or you you’re crazy.”

He continued to smile.

“Between the two of you there’s probably a **plague** of STDs I’d prefer not to be infected with.”

“You prefer the witch don’t you?”

“I prefer **no one**. Can’t a lady just prefer herself?”

His eyes darted down to her hands.

“Pervert. How about you walk away before the knife on the table behind me winds up in your chest.”

“I’d like other things thrust—“

Violence was never the answer. If Henry had been standing next to Emma she would have walked away. Told the kid that it was better to let things slide.

Henry wasn’t there, and Sinbad was the second pirate that day to make the worst innuendoes she’d ever heard. The second pirate to ignore her request for personal space.

And Emma was in a hall full of violent and lusty pirates.

So it just sort of happened. Her hands gripped his shoulder and pulled him forward and her knee slammed up into his crotch. He grunted and sagged in her arms. She had to carefully maneuver him back towards a column so he didn’t just drop to the ground like potatoes. Instead he slid slowly to the stone floor and stared off vacantly at nothing.

“Is he drooling?”

Regina had materialized next to her and she half expected a puff of purple smoke she appeared so suddenly. It was the first they’d spoken since they’d separated at the beginning of the evening. The other woman had grown flush over that time and her cheeks were red beneath the shade of her hood.

Emma toed Sinbad with her boot. “Yeah, that kind of happens when you get kneed in to groin by someone who knows how to hit.”

“Uncouth as always.”

She waved at the loud party, “When in Rome.” She didn’t have to look up to **feel** the exasperation coming off the other woman. 

Rome, in this case, had grown more drunken, bawdier and violent over the last few hours. It was a haze of half-naked bodies, booze and—

“The whole point is to appear as inebriated as the rest of these ingrates, so stop staring at them like you’re sober.”

“No one’s noticing.”

“Our host is. Unlike the rest of them he’s developed a tolerance for his brew.”

Emma frowned, “Brew?”

“Bluebeard’s beer.”

Was delicious. Emma had had a couple of pints.

Regina’s face froze before the beginning of a snarl formed at the corner of her mouth, “How many glasses did you have?”

“Four? Five? I’m fine.”

“Yes, I’m sure your tolerance for alcohol is superb. But just one sip of his beer has a powerful effect on inhibitions.”

“Oh. So that’s why we waited so long. So they’d all be magically liquored up and ready to do just about anything but stop us?”

Regina actually slapped her head that time, “Did you pay attention to any part of the plan?”

“Yes.” Most of it. But then they’d start talking about crazy magic junk and she’d drifted off—day dreaming about a world where Henry was just nuts and Regina was just a bitch and Mary Margaret was just a friend—

Regina flicked the end of her nose.

“Ow!”

“Day dreaming is what got you into this mess.”

“But I feel fine. Inhibitions intact.”

“Sterilized pirates aside that’s probably because you already have the self control of a toddler.”

“You drank it too!”

“Of course I did. People were watching. But like our host I spent years building a tolerance—”

“Regina.”

The blush of alcohol became more prominent on Regina’s face.

“Your hand is on my boob.”

Regina turned beet red. “That’s…”

“An interesting loss of inhibitions, your majesty.”

“You knocked out one of the most famous pirates in the world,” she tried to retort.

Emma shrugged, “Not the same as this—which is still happening and deeply disturbing.” She waved at Regina’s hand, chilly on her breast.

Regina was staring at her own appendage in wonder.

“Regina?”

The other woman finally snatched her hand away. “Come on,” she said, turning abruptly on her heel and stalked out of the hall.

Emma followed closely after her. The boob thing had been alarming, but kind of funny in the sense that it had proven Regina wasn’t all as awesome as she thought she was. It was just that it had actually happened and— “You’re not going to apologize for that?”

“It was magic,” she said over her shoulder. Like that explained everything.

“Sure,” Emma derided.

Regina stopped so suddenly Emma smacked into her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked behind them to the party which was now only a dull roar echoing down the hall, “Do we really have time—“

Regina continued to stare.

She sighed, “Okay, it’s just I’m starting to notice a trend with you…fairytale people and magic.”

“Magic is power.” Rote. Like the damn woman had learned it in Sunday school.

“No. Magic is an excuse you guys just kind of love to use.” She ticked them off, “You. Mary Margaret. David.” 

“Still sore about the wardrobe?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Regina didn’t have a snappy counter or creepy smile for that one. If anything she looked struck by Emma’s demand for empathy. “This world isn’t like our world Emma. Here magic really **is** everything. Kingdoms topple because of it. Marriages are ruined by it. And yes, children lose their parents to it.”

She said it like Emma wasn’t the only one who’d lost a parent to it. But Emma remembered that page in Henry’s book, the Evil Queen plucking the beating heart from her father’s chest.

“Like your father?”

Regina blinked and for a moment tears watered her eyes. “No,” she said simply, “ **magic** didn’t take my father from me.” 

She spun back around, effectively ending the conversation with her engimatic claim and leaving Emma no choice but to follow sullenly behind. She couldn’t say anything, the further they moved into the castle the more out of place and suspcious they became. So she stayed close and kept looking over her shoulder to make sure the creaks and groans she heard were just those of an old castle and not one of the giant golem things out to squish them.

Regina led them through winding corridors, up and down and up again. The light was dim but the path just visible enough that Emma didn’t have to pull out the penlight she’d managed to hold onto. Nevertheless Regina kept one hand in front of her, like a person wandering in the dark. Her steps were careful, but she was so focused on whatever she tried to feel with that extended hand that she sometimes misstepped. Emma would reach out and grab her other arm. It was always cold in her hand, as though Regina had just stepped away from a bitter winter wind.

“Is that magic too,” she asked finally breaking the suffocating silence. 

“Is what?”

“You’re freezing when I touch you.”

The fingers of her outstretched hand curled a moment and Regina faltered almost imperceptibly. “You can feel the cold?”

“Am I not supposed to?”

Her eyes flickered to Emma. “No.”

Emma looked down at the locket—her only link to Henry in this other world. It felt cold sometimes, especially the closer she got to Regina, and the minute she’d put it on the Regina and her head had become…realer somehow—or she had before disappearing. “Is it the locket?”

“No,” Regina responded immediately.

“Then what—“

“Shh. Before Emma could protest Regina had her hand against Emma’s stomach and was shoving her back into the shadows and standing between Emma and whatever was coming. The hand sandwiched between them dug into Emma and pleaded for silence.

And the reason emerged from the other end of the hallway. It was huge. Unnatural. It lumbered towards them with heavy steps.

A golem.

She’d seen them from a distance and in the shanty town she’d heard people talk of them, but up close they were something all together different.

She pictured something made of stone or clay. She wasn’t really sure why. Maybe some old movie had led to the idea. Or an episode of some dumb tv show. She just thought the thing would be like a big flexible statue that could smoosh someone with a balled up fist.

But the golem, the actual thing shuffling down the cramped hallway, smelled of rot. It was pitch black but the light of torches revealed a red sheen that was unmistakable when she smelled it.

Decay.

And copper.

Bits of white protruded from its form. Teeth. Bone.

Corpses.

The thing stopped in front of them. It didn’t have eyes, only two hollow spaces where eyes should be. It didn’t have a neck either. The head just sort of bulged up out of the shoulders. So it had to physically turn to face them, its barrel chest just inches from Regina’s still outstretched hand.

The cold that came off of her numbed the whole of Emma. It was the magic. She wasn’t that dumb. She understood that there was some kind of correlation between it and Regina. Unwilling to protest with death less than a foot away she clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. 

The thing leaned down, its hole body craning towards them.

Regina seemed to stop breathing as its head came within a hair’s breadth of her fingers. The empty space where eyes should be bored into Emma, turned her insides into a riot of nausea. Bile churned in her stomach and crept up her esophagus.

Close your eyes.

It was Regina’s voice in her head and whether it was the other Regina or the one pressed against her she didn’t care. She did as asked. Immediately the nausea abated, starting somewhere near Regina’s hand and flaring out, chased by that biting cold.

The thing moved again. It lumbered away with awful steps like the smack of dead flesh against stone.

Then there was only their breath. It was so cold she would have thought it would have been a cloud in the air, but it was only **in** her.

Regina rounded on her and examined her, pressing and poking. “Are you all right?”

“Yes…” It was like she’d been running in a snowstorm. “What—what’s going on?”

“I had to hide us.”

“So why’s it—“

Regina rubbed her hands up and down Emma’s arms in an attempt to warm her. “It’s my magic.”

“It’s like a freezer.”

“To you,” she countered part knowingly and with just a hint of annoyance.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The hands stilled on her biceps. Regina cocked her head, “What’s the darkness to the light?”

“The flip-side?” She rolled her shoulders back. 

Regina didn’t let go, but tilted her head, asking her question as patiently as the schoolteacher she’d made of Snow White, “And to step into the darkness from that light.” 

The cold.

“This is what dark…magic or whatever…feels like?”

“Only to someone who doesn’t use it.” Emma didn’t miss the gentle squeeze Regina gave her before letting her hands fall to her side. “Come along. We’re almost there.”

 

####

“There” was a turret that hovered precariously over the sea. The steps leading up to it were slick with sea water and green moss clung to the stones making it all feel very much like an ill kept house too close to the water.

Emma’s hand kept politely rising up to spot Regina as she made the climb. It was a chivalrous motion. Something Charming might have taught her if he hadn’t abandoned her a magical wardrobe.

The damp soaked the fringes of Regina’s dress and cloak, making both articles of clothing much heavier, and making her almost grateful for Emma’s bred thoughtfulness.

But then that hand wouldn’t hover and instead would graze her back and warmth would flare and the reminder of what Emma was would present itself all over again.

The savior. The product of True Love. Imbued with potent destiny. 

The light meant to cast out the darkness.

Meant to cast out Regina.

“Could you please stop that,” she asked.

Emma held her hands up in surrender, “Sorry. Just trying to avoid dying when you and the heels on those boots go ass over tea kettle.”

“I’ve managed to make it this far in life without your protection Miss Swan. I think I can navigate these stairs.”

“ **I** can barely navigate them” Emma said. It was probably supposed to make Regina feel better.

“You can also barely navigate the roads of Storybrooke.”

Emma shot her the finger.

“Glib.”

“I try.”

They reached the top of the turret. The walls were lower there and the wind off the water was more a gale, buffeting them both and whistling loudly in their ears. With the crash of the waves far below it was a cacophony.

But the door before them was iron and wood and unlike so much of what they’d seen in Bluebeard’s castle it looked as new as the day it was crafted. The wood appeared freshly hewn from a tree and there wasn’t even a hint of rust on the iron.

Bluebeard’s magic **wafted** off of it. She’d managed to put old guards into place in her head so she barely noticed it, but Emma’s hands went to her stomach and the nausea reappeared.

The first time Regina had just assumed the woman was sick from the awful food she’d eaten in the shanty town, but then she noticed how Emma seemed to grow sick every time Bluebeard’s gaze fell on her, or his magic grew more powerful. 

And then she’d mentioned the cold.

No.

She put aside the niggling concern of **what** Emma was. She didn’t have time for it. Not when they had a door of iron, wood and magic to break through, more magic to steal, and a fortress of the darkest magic to escape from.

“Do we just kick it in?” Emma’s frank plan of attack was almost amusing.

“Be my guest.”

Emma eyed her, “I’ll break my foot won’t I?”

“You’re learning.”

“Okay, so what do we do?”

“I work my magic. You keep anything that comes up the stairs to investigate from getting to me.”

“Seriously. That’s it?”

Regina held her hand out and Emma started to take it out of unnerving habit, but a sword appeared. It was a pirate’s sword. A single edged cutlass with a bulky guard that would protect the user’s hand and work similarly to brass knuckles if so desired.

Emma’s eyes danced between the blade in Regina’s hand and Regina herself.

“What’s that?”

“A sword. The magic I’ll be using will definitely get Bluebeard’s attention. He’ll send his golems to investigate and you’ll have to fight them off.”

“Couldn’t you have conjured a gun or something?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because—“

She looked sympathetic, “Don’t know how?”

Regina bristled. She knew the woman was bating her. Knew it as clearly as she knew she hated her, but she couldn’t stop herself from snapping back, “I know how to create a gun.”

“Then do it.”

“Take the blasted sword and defend me with life and limb.”

“Give me a gun.”

“Fine.” She held out her other hand.

“That’s a blunderbuss.”

The ungrateful— “Do I look like a mechanical engineer? Because unless you have a few decades of gun design and physics in that brain of yours this is the best I can manage.”

Emma relented and gingerly took the handheld shotgun, shoving it into her belt without blowing a whole in her stomach. She then accepted the cutlass and made a few test slashes in the air.

“Will that suffice?”

“I’d prefer a real shotgun and a couple molotov cocktails, but if this is what I’ve got—“

“It is.”

“So I protect you and you break the door down.”

“That **is** the plan.”

“Then why do you sound so unsure?”

Because, she looked back at the door, in his seat of power Bluebeard was as powerful as the Dark One, and Regina hadn’t performed substantial spellcraft in decades.

“Just hope I break in before Bluebeard himself decides to investigate.”

“That bad,” the foolish girl asked.

“Worse.”

 

####

Holy shit. Golems. A stream of them. They glistened in the moonlight. Groaned like the dead as they shuffled towards her with outstretched arms.

One minute Regina had her face screwed up in concentration the way Henry did, with the narrowed eyes and pursed lips and the next the groaning had begun to echo up the stairwell from the castle below.

She pulled the gun from her belt and aimed it down the stairs. There were two barrels on it. Two triggers. Two shots.

“How long is that door thing going to take?”

“Nervous,” Regina shouted back.

Well if she had time to be a bitch than it probably wasn’t that dire.

Unless her plan after all this time was to let Emma be murdered…

“A little.”

“Just keep them at bay Sheriff.”

They had their pet names—or they’d be pet names if they were a—they had pet names. The ones they used to cut one another, the ones they used to distance themselves. And sometimes those names could take on whole new meanings. Regina was “madame mayor” in front of the townspeople. And on the castle stairwell “sheriff” was a sign of trust.

She took aim. Waited. Waited. The stairwell was so narrow and the golems so wide they could only climb one at a time. Her arm ached with the weight of the weapon. The cutlass was slippery in her sweaty hand. The nausea grew and grew until the bile was crawling up her throat and the stench of the golems was all she could smell.

She fired. The lead shot straight through the golem sending ichor in every direction and tearing through all the flesh and bone and nothingness at its core. The sound of the gun, the loud roar of it, was a comfort. Guns Emma knew. Even ancient guns that could easily explode in her hand. Guns were her world and though she just had one shot left before the cutlass was her only weapon that first shot had invigorated her.

The next golem tried to climb over the corpse and she sunk her blade into its skull, cleaving it like a cantaloupe. The blade slid out of its head with none of the pull she’d expected. There was always pull when yanking a blade out of a body.

“Any luck,” she called as she stabbed the next one through one of its eye holes.

There was a screaming noise as the door was wrenched off its hinges. It flew through the air, narrowing avoiding Emma before slamming into the fourth golem and sending it tumbling backwards.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

She slashed through the fifth one.

 

####

Emma hadn’t pressed Regina on what exactly they were stealing from Bluebeard and for that she was immensely grateful. The woman had a habit of making Regina’s world feel a little…ridiculous. While she was content to be an evil queen in a timeless struggle with Snow White and Henry was only too happy to go along Emma looked at her, and who she was, like she was crazy, or not real.

The only comfort was in knowing that she probably looked at Snow the exact same way. Like they were all just a little crazy for being from an Enchanted Forest.

But this. Stealing silver slippers from Bluebeard? That would be too much. She just **knew** it would be the final insult lobbed at the sheriff’s delicate psyche. Because she’d ask what was so special about them and Regina would have to explain that they were one of two pairs of slippers capable of transporting the wearer to any land.

“Two,” Emma would undoubtedly ask.

“The others are ruby red.”

She could see the ensuing scene so clearly in her head she half thought she had Rumpelstiltskin’s ability to prophesize. 

Outside at the entrance of the turret Emma had lost a little ground in her pitched battle with the golems. She’d proved herself at least physically equipped to dealing with them. With her first shot she’d turned the stairwell into a choke point. The golems that came after had to clamber over the bodies of the others and despite their strength they were slow and clumsy creatures. Emma’s short sailor’s sword matched her street-born style of combat, allowing her to hack and slash at the golems and make every single blow count.

It was almost a wonder to watch.

But Regina had to have other goals. Slippers made of silver and magic.

Knowing their “host” as she did she expected them to be sitting on a pedestal at the center of the room, glowing in light of the sun during the day and the moon at night. On that count she wasn’t disappointed.

The problem was…there was only one shoe.

“Regina! Now would be the time to go I think,” Emma shouted from the stairwell.

She rushed across the room and snatched it up. Her eyes hungrily searched the shadows and corners in the desperate hope that the other shoe had been flung away.

But no. There was just the one shoe.

At least…she held it close and touched it’s magic with her own. Yes. There was enough magic to open a portal. Enough to get them home.

But only just enough. There could be no room for errors and no time wasted. There was enough magic to get her back to Henry, but with one wrong move she or Emma or Snow would be trapped in the Enchanted Forest for forever.

“Seriously! Regina hurry!”

 

####

One minute the golems still “alive” were all lumbering forward and the next the most unholy sound Emma had ever heard was coming from within them. The sound of wood screaming as it was torn apart and a human crying in the throes of death and flesh rending.

Then they were tearing themselves apart. Ripping through sinew and flesh until their two halves swayed together. She drew the blunderbuss and aimed it warily.

“Regina! Now would be the time to go I think.”

The sound the golems were making suddenly multiplied. Because what had been one was becoming two. Arms. Actual arms and legs started to grow from the halves. New, slimmer, gangly golems were being created from the behemoths she’d been doing okay with.

“Shit.”

Gangly translated to agile and the first two leapt lithely over the choke point of bodies. There was no time to cry. No time to be horrified or to acknowledge the awful nausea cramping her stomach. There was only time to defend. The cutlass came out swiftly, like the bat she used to use, and she blocked each swipe. Parrying and jabbing or whatever the hell a person did with a sword.

Then leaping.

Twisting.

Doing everything she could to avoid their club-like arms.

“Seriously! Regina hurry!”

She danced back towards the door, ducking under one swipe and leaping over another before lopping off a third golem’s head.

Christ there were so many!

Fucking golems.

How the hell was she supposed to fight a sea of super fancy fast golems. She was a god damned bounty hunter from Boston damn it. She wasn’t cut.

Out.

For.

This.

The golems were all thrown back by a wave of something warm and powerful and then a cold hand was on her wrist and Regina was turning her around. 

“Emma are you—“

“Did you do that?” She knew the answer. 

“No.”

Of course not. Because Regina’s hand was like ice on her but fire seemed to skitter across Emma’s skin, burning her from within and filling her with emotions she regularly avoided. 

Like love.

And anger.

God damn anger.

That cold hand suddenly clasped her chin and jerked her head around so she was forced to look into Regina’s eyes. 

“Miss Swan we don’t have time for you to freak out.”

“What the hell was that?”

“Magic. From within you.”

“But I’m—“

“Something we can discuss later.”

The golems were getting up. Collecting themselves.

“Right.” Right. “Okay so we—“

Regina took her hand. “We run.”

Then Emma and Regina were snaking through the golems, but instead of rushing for the stairwell Regina lead them to the edge of the turret. Ten feet below was a roof.

“Are you insane?”

“If we get to the edge of the castle I can teleport us away, but we have to hurry. Bluebeard himself will be here soon and if he—“

“I know,” she swung her leg over the side, “Death. Destruction.” She offered her hand to Regina, “You coming your majesty?”

“After you, princess.”

Emma took one last second to make sure the cutlass was secure then leapt. She hit hard, stumbled and fell forward onto her hands and knees. The wooden shingles bit into her palms.

Regina landed neatly beside her, completely flawless in her dark dress.

“I hate you.”

Regina just raised a single eyebrow. Haughty even as golems started clambering over the wall and falling around them like sacks of meat. Regina waved her hand in the direction of the first unlucky few to land and sent them flying off the roof and into the darkness.

With her other hand she pulled Emma up and dragged her across the roof until Emma got enough of her bearings back to run without a queen in a fancy dress’s help.

“That psychic fling thing is handy,” she huffed.

“Thank you,” Regina wheezed. One hand was hold her skirt clear of her feet and her other she used to fling the faster golems away. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this trick.”

“Hopefully not too long a—“ they leapt from one roof to the next, clearing a gap she wouldn’t have even dreamed of attempting usually— “ago.”

They leapt again and each woman landed with barely a grunt. Impressive because Emma was covered in sweat and her majesty didn’t look much cleaner.

“We’re almost there,” Regina shouted triumphantly.

Then she was tumbling across the roof, shoved by one of the golems. Emma had her sword out and through the thing’s torso before Regina could even turn to use her magic. She offered her hand again, and Regina, for once, took it mutely. No snide remark or raised eyebrow or defensive little gesture.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

So close to the wall of the castle there was an urgency. They had a finish line in sight now. A way out. An end to their quest. They just had to get there. Just had to dodge golems or fling them away or cut them in half. Just had to keep moving.

Emma’s legs burned and her arms were clumsier and clumsier with every stroke. Regina was pale despite her darker complexion and the sweat on her cheeks and breasts glistened. She snapped the latch on her cloak and it flew off with their next leap, billowing out behind them and tangling up two golems in the process.

They just had to get to the end. A few more steps and there’d be Regina’s magic and escape. They’d find their horse. Find Mary Margaret. They’d find their way home.

“Take my hand.”

The relief of Regina’s cold magic should have been shocking to her system. The darkness of it set her teeth on edge, but the coolness was a balm, abating the fire churning inside of her and drying the sweat soaking through her shirt.

And for one instant they weren’t rivals in a pitched battle for Henry’s love. They weren’t wary. There was no caution. There was no fear. For one moment Emma’s hand was clasped in Regina’s and they were a pair. A duo. Adventurers bound together. The joy of escape united them. The adrenalin overwhelmed the hurt that ran beneath the surface of who they both were.

For one moment Regina smiled like a human.

For one moment Emma was elated.

The purple clouded her vision and the queerest of sensations overtook her.

Then she was stumbling to her knees and throwing up every last thing she’d ever eaten and only dimly aware of Regina next to her in the exact same state.

And the rot of Bluebeard’s castle was overwhelming. And whatever destination Regina had had in mind was gone. Because Emma knew where they were and she knew the two men looming over them.

Hook grinned.

But Bluebeard.

God. He was a nightmare of a man. Scowling down at them, his lips somewhere between rage and joy. “Did you really think it would be that easy?”

For a second, yeah, Emma kind of had.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Could there be a chapter fifteen by Monday or Tuesday. Survey says THERE’D BETTER BE. If the ending of this chapter confuses you be patient because it will totally be explained in the next chapter.
> 
> Warning: Some portions of this chapter may be triggering so please proceed with caution.

Bluebeard continued to grin. His teeth were yellowed and against that insane blue beard of his it was like looking at a living painting by Picasso or Matisse or something. 

“It’s been a while your majesty.”

The honorific sounded anything but from his blue lips.

Regina was still hunched over. Her fingers scraped against the stone. The tips of them white as they held her up. Her eyes were open but unfocused and drool or bile fell in a long disgusting stream from her open mouth. 

Emma tried to stand—though she wasn’t sure what the hell she’d do. The nausea hadn’t actually gone away, but moving—fighting—was better than waiting for that bastard to loom over her. 

Only Regina’s hand shot out. Fire fled from her fingertips, moving blindly across the room in an orange streak that fizzled sadly against the silk stretched across Bluebeard’s chest.

He laughed. It was a booming noise that reminded Emma of every boogeyman she’d ever met. The foster dads and idiot teachers and cops who wielded their size like weapons. The bullies and bastards who’d used and abused her and every other defenseless kid.

Emma chanced a look at Regina and found what she would have considered a look of horror on any other person’s face. Regina’s dark eyes were wide with something like fear and…regret. It was too human an expression to be wielded by the Evil Queen. The unflappable mayor and villain of Henry’s book was at a loss—out of her element.

Bluebeard held his meaty hand out and squeezed it into a fist. The motion was magic at work. Regina flew up into the air without a single word. She hung there, clawing at an invisible noose around her neck and trying to thrash. Only she was bound by an invisible force and could only twitch, her fingers nervous at her throat and her legs jerking garishly.

Emma moved then. She charged Bluebeard intent on doing—anything. She rushed shoulder first with her head tucked down. It would have been a brutal hit, but the traitor pirate bastard snagged her arm in his hook and threw her back against the wall, rushing forward and holding her in place before she could make for Bluebeard again.

“Don’t,” he growled.

She thrashed, “Get off me you lying sack of—“

He slammed her against the wall again. Stars scattered across her vision. “Stop. You’re only hurting yourself!”

“Fu—“

“You should listen to him child.” Bluebeard’s voice was molasses. Sticky, cloying and dripping down her insides. “The pirate is looking out for you.”

“The pirate is looking out for himself.”

Bluebeard didn’t hear her. He was staring up at Regina. She’d gone completely rigid, unable to even twitch, and Emma could see the tendons in her neck bulging as she tried to breathe.

He relaxed his hand and Regina gasped for air. Then he squeezed again. The relaxed. And squeezed. It was a game.

“You’re killing her!” 

God damn it. Clearly. He was torturing her. Putting Regina on the cusp of consciousness and pulling her back as he pleased.

Still unconcerned with Emma Bluebeard said, “Pirate, take that one downstairs.” A frank little missive like she was a fucking dog—

She charged forward again, slipping around Hook and getting so close to Bluebeard she could see the specks of dust on his boots. Then he faced her, with his lips livid like the dead, his beard blue as the morning sky and flecks of ice where the rest of the world had eyes, and she crumpled. The nausea was worse than any she’d ever known. Somehow it went beyond the need to vomit and was instead an agony that coursed like waves through her entire body. 

She tried to pick herself up but her arms couldn’t support her weight. She could only lie on the ground begging the sensation to leave her and watching Regina hover in the air her face as blue as Bluebeard’s lips.

Someone—Hook—grabbed her ankle and dragged her from the room. She slid over rough wood and polished stone and bare dirt. Slowly, painfully, the nausea receded. Around the same time Hook stopped and leaned her against a wall to better look at her.

“How you feeling dear?”

“Fuck you.”

Ignoring her he reached over to check her temperature with his hand. It was a mistake for him. Emma had taken down guys twice—hell **triple** —his size. She grabbed him by the fingers and twisted so hard he shouted in pain as joints were forced nearly beyond reason.

“You betrayed us,” she growled.

He raised his hook to strike but she caught it easily and twisted it off his arm smoothly, thrusting it up under his chin so swiftly she broke the skin.

“I—“

She dug in with the hook and twisted the fingers.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple brushing against the curve of the hook. “He recognized Regina. Soon as we walked in. Was going to kill all of us.”

“So you gave her up?”

“Would you prefer we all be strung up on invisible wires right now?”

“She’s our only way home.”

Despite the hook in his neck and her grip on his fingers the man smiled. That nasty one he’d wielded with Regina on his boat. “No. She’s not.”

For just a moment Emma was that eighteen year old girl who did what felt right rather than what **was** right. Hook somehow had a way to get them away. They’d find Mary Margaret and go home and Regina could become a distant memory. It would solve so many of her problems in Storybrooke. She’d have her son and there’d be no one else. No one to coordinate playdates with or fill in on the comings and goings at the school. Emma could walk away and be free of Regina and her insidious hold on Emma’s life.

No.

That woman in the other room had been close enough to human that Emma could still muster some sort of empathy for her. Could separate her from the legendary villain her son had told her of. “I’m not leaving without her.”

He started to laugh.

His face fell when she didn’t look so amused.

“You can’t—didn’t the woman curse you? Why on earth would you want to help her?”

“It’s what decent people do.”

“Decent people don’t survive long.”

She shrugged. “I’ve made it this far.”

She let him go and watched him dart to the opposite wall to keep out of her reach. “So what’s your plan then? Go in with sword swinging? Rescue the damsel and ride off on your great white horse?”

“Are you nuts?”

“You’re the one wanting to rescue the woman.”

He was right on that point. She did want to rescue her, and Hook wouldn’t be of use unless it was minimum effort and almost no risk. “He wanted you to take me downstairs. Where?”

“His jail.” His face was dark. “People don’t come back from there often.”

“And Regina? He’s what—going to torture her until he gets tired?”

“He’s going to torture her for decades if he can. You saw how focused he was.”

She had. He was terrifying. He’d played Regina like a marionette. Manipulated her as no human should. But he was also cocky. And cocky bastards like Bluebeard were the easiest to play. Didn’t matter how much money or power they had as long as they had that hubris. “Take me to the jail. When Bluebeard is done with Regina for the day he’ll send her down there too. Right?”

“It’s a filthy hellish hole. What more perfect place to make your mortal enemy sleep.”

“Good.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Just make sure she gets down there and into the same cell as me.”

“Anything else? Tea? A last meal? Another escape? Because I’m afraid this is the only one I have in me.”

She handed his hook back over to him. “How about you avoid the betrayal thing a little longer. Give me a day.”

“I could drop you down there and make my own way to your world.”

“If that was really true you wouldn’t have been in the room with Bluebeard, and you sure as hell wouldn’t have offered to help me escape just now.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m bluffing?”

“I know a liar when I see one. You’ve got nothing but hopes, and me.”

“She’s no better.”

No. She wasn’t. 

Hook slotted his hook back into place. “You really think you can get her out and get us all back to your world?”

Emma quickly re-catalogued everything she’d seen in the last couple of days. Sifting through it all from a point of observation. If she wasn’t viewing herself in everything it was almost easy to grasp, and from it all she could see a big crazy plan that might, **maybe** work.

“Yeah, I do.”

 

####

In her dreams there was always the need to run but somehow her body couldn’t do it. She’d stand still as death descended and the terror of inevitability would sing in her veins, forcing her awake finally and sucking in deep breaths of real air.

Being bound by Bluebeard’s magic was the very same sensation. There was no pain. There was only the complete control. With it came another sort of agony limited only to her mind.

She could not move unless Bluebeard willed it.

Could not breathe unless Bluebeard demanded it.

She’d spent twenty-eight years with a whole town at her beck and call and now she was the puppet of a sadist.

He let her breathe again and mused as she sucked in huge lungfuls of air. “What must the blond be capable of that you’d willingly partner with her,” Bluebeard wondered. “The girl and queen I knew liked to work alone.”

She started to scowl but Bluebeard held his hand up again and every muscle in her body went rigid.

“Don’t frown girl. It doesn’t become such a pretty face.”

The muscles in her face all curled up into a painful smile.

“Much better.” 

She was possessed by his magic. Vicious and nauseous it coursed through her veins and seized up her nerves. Blood magic. Fueled by the taking of life it commanded the living body with more finesse than any natural sort of magic could. 

He snapped his fingers like a master commanding his dog and Regina followed jerkily after him from the room.

“The two of you were cast out of the paradise you crafted? Snow White finally gathered the wits necessary to deal effectively with her father’s killer?”

The questions were rhetorical in nature, as Regina still could not speak. 

“If Leopold had had a son you would be dead now. Yet I find myself quite grateful that his wife bore him a child of the weaker sex.”

They came to a room of soft silks and hard woods. A table sat at the center with a large bottle of wine and two crystal goblets on its surface. He motioned to one chair and Regina sat in it robotically.

Behind them something dripped noisily. Another pipe ill kept for the last twenty-nine years.

“Snow White cast you out rather than kill you,” he smiled, “leaving that singular pleasure to me.” He poured Regina a cup of wine and pushed it towards her. “Drink.” 

She wasn’t thirsty but her hand took up the cup all the same and brought it to her lips. The wine burned in her mouth. She drained the cup and set it down. Bluebeard filled it again.

“I have had nearly twenty-nine long years to plot the ways I would kill you.”

Plural?

“There will be many.”

“You can’t just—“ 

“Drink.”

She drank again. The pipe continued to drip. The wine wasn’t right. It tasted brackish. Burned, but was thick in her mouth.

“I thought about drowning you first. Or maybe flaying you alive. Shooting you in the head holds appeal.”

“Whatever death you choose you should make it count my dear. Don’t won’t to waste it.”

“Oh poor girl, you think that in the last twenty-nine years I did not spend countless hours each day plotting this punishment?” He leaned across the table. “You abandoned me to this world. Left me with the dredges of your wrath.”

She drank again, but this time of her own volition. There was something familiar in the back of the wine. Some taste she couldn’t yet put into words. “Some might have considered it a gift. I gave you an entire land.”

“Devoid of population.”

Because Bluebeard could not be trusted to rule them. He’d only murder and torture until he was bored. Regina despised all the people and their happy endings, but she’d never be so cruel as to unleash a monster like Bluebeard upon them. That was a torture even she couldn’t stomach.

“I would think you’d have no trouble populating it if you desired.” She frowned. “Though it must be difficult. I took your beloved Donkeyskin away didn’t I? And no one else has ever quite **moved** you as she did.” 

He stroked the fringes of his beard.

It was one small moment of peace. She could hear each mote of dust fall. Her heart beat in her chest and the wine thrummed in her veins. Peace and a scant instance of serenity. 

She’s pushed him too far. Got right to the heart of his anger far quicker than she’d intended. Bluebeard’s face did not even contort. One moment he was at rest and the next he was throwing the whole table aside with one fleshy hand and kicking Regina’s chair over with one giant boot and straddling her with two thighs like iron. He ripped the front of her gown and pressed his hand between her breasts. 

“I thought of all the ways I could kill you Regina, and I realized that I could do each one.”

His fingers, blunt and strong, dug into her flesh. There was no magic in the touch. None of the grace Rumpelstiltskin taught her when removing hearts. Just the press of nails into skin and agony. She threw her head back and tried to scream, but the cry caught in her throat. She saw what had been dripping in the shadows. Not water from a pipe. 

Blood from a dying girl. 

Blood that had been mixed with the wine. Coated her tongue. Boiled in her stomach.

Blood that flowed slowly across the stone floor. 

Bluebeard dipped his hand into it and roughly smeared it all across Regina’s face.

“I think I’ll rip your,” skin tore, “heart out this time girl.” Muscle shredded, “I know I can’t do it quite as deftly as you or your mother,” bones cracked, “but the end is all that matters.”

 

####

The cell smelled like urine, poop, and something actually more disgusting. Which she hadn’t thought possible. It was like the rot that pervaded the whole castle, but somehow…worse. Oily. Slick. Sick.

She stayed close to the bars that served as the door to the cell in the hopes of catching a gust of fresh air from above. So far she’d been without luck. She’d been there an hour already. No sign of Regina. No sign of Hook. No sign of anyone.

Just her and the ghost in her head.

“What’s the plan dear? Fight your way out with saber and guts?”

“Why does everybody just assume I’m gonna run around swinging a sword? I didn’t even **touch** one until the dragon thing.”

“You’re a brash white knight brimming with idealism and optimism.”

She glared.

Regina, in her perfect dress and makeup untouched by the filth around them, shrugged. “You just hide it behind that worldly pessimistic exterior.”

“Yeah, I’m secretly a do-gooder fairy tale princess.”

Regina’s smile was catlike, “I always thought so.”

“Shut up.”

“What **is** your plan though?”

“Sneak out with the real you. Find Mary Margaret. Maybe kill the bad guy.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“Optimism. Remember your Majesty?”

“Such grace. Someone teaching you manners?”

Emma let her forehead thump against the cold iron bars of the cell. “Yeah. The real you. Where is she anyways?”

“Dying.”

“Funny.”

But Regina wasn’t laughing. She just looked incredibly sad. “No. She’s absolutely dying dear. You can’t feel it because there’s no magic in her death, but if you thought to look—“

“No.” God. Just…the idea of trying to use magic? To try and use it to see what was happening to Regina? She pressed her head harder against the bars.

“It’s probably for the best. Experiencing another’s death can be quite traumatic. Though…you’ll notice—“ She raised a single finger.

On cue a wave of cold struck Emma so hard she staggered, her hand reaching for the bars to keep upright. “Jesus what the hell was that?”

“The death of the Evilest of Queens.”

“Regina,” she warned.

The other woman did that maddening thing again where she was suddenly just **there** in front of Emma. Her hand rose, as if to touch her and Emma brought her own hand up protectively. 

“How about enough of the grab hands.”

“I was offering to teach you.”

“Does it require all the touching?”

Regina’s lips curled up into a smile that might have been playful on someone else, “No.”

“Then don’t do it!”

“Oh please. I wasn’t the one that grabbed your breast earlier.”

“No, the actual you did that—which weird by the way.”

She shrugged. “No inhibitions. It’s why you were punching people and actually being polite to her.”

“I hate her.”

“Of course dear.”

“What was that really? That cold just now?”

“I told you.”

“Regina’s dead?”

It sounded weird to say.

The one in her head nodded, “Yes. Quite.”

“But…”

Regina wasn’t supposed to be dead. She was supposed to die later. At some point in the future. When Henry was old and married and Emma was about forty times more loved and respected and successful. She was supposed to be bitter and irritated and always sitting alone at family get togethers. It was a whole thing Emma had happily dreamt up on more than one occasion. 

“Of course. Only the product of True Love would wish Christmas dinners into the miserable future of her arch-nemesis.”

“She’s not dead.”

“No dear. She is.”

Emma crossed the room and took a seat on the hard wooden bench bolted to the wall. She hugged her knees.

Regina was supposed to be alive.

“Don’t tell me you’re in denial?”

Regina and Henry and Mary Margaret. They were the longest relationships she’d ever had. One of them just being snuffed out was supposed to do something to her. She’d died inside when she thought she’d lost Henry and it made her nauseous to think of losing Mary Margaret.

But Regina was gone and she felt nothing and the absence of feeling made her shiver.

The other Regina gingerly took a seat next to her. 

“You being dead would be a lot easier a story to swallow if you weren’t sitting here.”

“I’m not me. Just an echo.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. More magic crap.”

“You call it crap but—“

“It’s power. And it’s why we didn’t escape. And it’s why we’re stuck here in the first place. Please. Save it.”

“Magic is also a part of you.”

“Just one more excuse for some healthy self-loathing when I get out of here.”

“I would love to discuss that particularly haunting nugget of information but I’m afraid our conversation is coming to an end.”

“You disappearing again?”

“You’re going to pass out.”

Emma raised an eyebrow, “I am?”

Regina nodded, “Yes. Quite soon in fact.”

“And you know this because…”

“You and that idiot are bound together by that ridiculous locket. So you felt her death. Now she’s about to be brought back to life by the darkest magic imaginable. I can only guess how it will effect you.”

“But passing out is high on the list?”

“The high—“ 

Fuck.

The room was darker. Shadows crept over her eyes. Everything blurred. Regina grew distant. She really was…God damn it she was passing out…

Fuck…

…

Nothing.

Sleeping.

Was being nice to Regina really about no inhibitions?

Footsteps.

The screech of rusted hinges.

And then she was awake and someone was being tossed into the cell with her. She stood up and swayed in place as all the blood rushed to her head.

She’d actually passed out. Just straight up conked. Collapsing in a heap and dreaming of conversations she never wanted to have.

Regina had said the real her had died.

And been brought back to life.

And Emma’d passed out because of it. 

Because of magic.

If she could blow up the whole damn concept with a stick of dynamite she would have.

She raked her hands through her hair to try and get her brain back into form before even daring to look at the lump of person that had just been thrown into the cell with her.

From far away it could have been anyone. The dark palette of the clothes though. That suggested that it was either Hook or Regina, somewhere between living and dead.

Emma wasn’t about to let herself pause and ruminate on it. Stopping. Thinking. Those were one way tickets to a couple of rabbit holes of insanity.

Tying her hair back into a knot like a badass she just allowed herself a moment to breath instead.

Then she crossed the room and approached the lump of person.

Closer she could make out the clothes and differentiate beyond “black.”

“Regina?” 

She was shredded. Her clothes were torn.

And the blood. It was everywhere.

 

####

Dealing in dark magic, especially the kind that could consume one’s soul just to curse a whole land, Regina had learned to tolerate pain. She’d found ways to work around it. To escape it. Bluebeard had pulled her heart from her chest with his bare hand. Pushed through muscle and bone and sinew and the agony had been beyond words so Regina had escaped it all. Disappeared so far into her head that she couldn’t even realize the enormity of what was being done.

Bluebeard had killed her. Snuffed her out as simply as a bug. Squashed her beneath his hand.

And then he’d resurrected her in the blood of an innocent girl. 

When she awoke from a sleep no mortal should wake from it had ached as fully as being killed in the first place. The air had flooded her lungs—scraping across them like sandpaper and the blood in her veins had moved again, growing less sluggish with each passing second.

She gasped. She might have screamed if her muscles, recently dead and cold, hadn’t been learning to function again. She could only breathe and stare and clutch at the warm body that had been sitting so close when she’d come to.

It was a furnace of comfort and heat that chased away the chill in her bones.

A hand ran through her tangled and bloody hair.

“It’s okay,” a kind voice soothed. “I got ya.”

A blunted voice that usually irritated her. She froze in those arms. Tried to push away all the almost happy sensations that washed over her.

Emma didn’t notice her freeze. Didn’t feel the dawning panic in the center of Regina. Emma was True Love. Or the product of it. She was perfectly natural and content with her gentle embrace and soothing words.

“Taking advantage Miss Swan,” she finally said. Easier to bristle than to accept.

Emma shoved her away and stood. “Sorry. You were—“

“Passed out.”

“Dead.”

“So what, you were engaging in some necrophilic tendencies?”

“Or trying to be decent to the woman who was panicking as she came back to life. Real sincere panic. Lot of clutching on your part your Majesty.”

“I was being brought back to life!”

“Nice to know your first impulse was to hug me.”

Regina tried not to let Emma’s goading show on her face. She grunted and pulled herself to her feet. The whole front of her dress was stiff with drying blood and the plunge of her neckline had plunged a little more when Bluebeard had ripped it to get at her heart. 

She pressed her hand against her bare skin. Oh thank—she closed her eyes in relief. A healthy human heart beat wildly in her chest. Her heart. As familiar as her hands or knees or toes.

“Still there,” Emma asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he—“

“Rip it out in the goriest fashion imaginable while I was still alive? Yes, he did.”

It had been surreal.

The most awful of dreams.

“And then he brought you back.”

“His magic is potent.”

“Can you do that?”

“Thankfully no.”

Emma tilted her head, “I’d figure you’d be a big fan of that trick.”

Yes. Dirtying her own heart further to kill and resurrect her enemies over and over again. What a wonderful way to waste her life and doom her soul. She rolled her eyes.

“Oh sure. Judge me. Lady who rips hearts out all the time.”

“Those are through magic. The victim feels little and doesn’t die unless I choose to kill them.”

“Semantics.”

“Perhaps. But critical when debating the morality of magicks.”

The girl narrowed her verdant eyes, “Why do I get the feeling you just used a magick with a “k” in real people conversation?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not as much as you and Bluebeard both being murderers,” she pestered.

Regina rolled her eyes again. 

“Hey, no. I let a lot of stuff slide, especially with you because you’re Henry’s mom. But you’re a killer Regina. From where I sit the only difference between you and Bluebeard is he brings the victims back to life.”

 

####

Regina looked like she’d been slapped. “Is that really what you think?”

Emma wouldn’t have said it otherwise.

Regina ran her hand through her hair as she fought to control what Emma knew was a vicious temper. It caught in strands stuck together by Regina’s own dried blood. She used her hands to pull her bloodied dress closed again instead. “We are not the same.”

“Right. You’re Henry’s mom.” 

“It’s more than that.”

“That’s all that matters.” Mary Margaret would have been appalled at how easily Emma could forgive.

“It shouldn’t be,” Regina snapped. “He…Bluebeard is a monster.”

“And you’re not?”

There was no quick retort for that. Regina worked her jaw and tugged at her dress some more. “If,” she said carefully, “you find me so monstrous then why are you here?”

“Excuse me?”

“I know Hook, Emma. He no doubt offered you a way to escape. Maybe suggested that you two make your way without me. Yet you’re here in this cell.”

“Because Hook is a liar and still needs us. And because Henry would never forgive me if I let you die, and because I wouldn’t either.”

“I would have left you in a heartbeat.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s what makes you a monster, Regina.”

That seemed to sap what little anger was left in the woman. She turned away and wrapped her fingers around the bars of the cell door, resting her head against them much as Emma had done earlier. 

Emma returned to the bench but leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees.

She refused to feel bad for what she’d said. Refused to feel anything but a little righteous. Regina had spent **months** tearing Emma down in every fashion imaginable. It was only fair to give as good as she’d gotten.

But Regina kept standing there. Closed off. She was even shivering.

Damn it.

The woman had been tortured. **Killed** apparently. Who knows what had happened. She didn’t need Emma ragging on her on top of that.

“Sorry.”

Regina turned her head, but didn’t quite look over her shoulder.

“We should be acting like adults right now—not fighting. What you did in the past, it’s the past.”

“If I could kill you without repercussions I would,” Regina muttered. Never satisfied. Never willing to accept a peace offering. 

So Emma ignored the part of her telling her to use kid gloves and pushed back. “Really. Because I can think of a couple of times in the last day alone you could have let me die. Henry wouldn’t have blamed you. Hell Mary Margaret would have been hard pressed to say it was your fault.”

Regina twisted around and leaned back casually against the bars and crossed her arms protectively across her torso. “You insist I’m a monster and then just as quickly insist I am not. Make up your mind **princess**.”

“I know you’re a monster Regina. What you did to Henry. To me. Hell to the town. That’s what a monster does. But you love Henry and you’ve saved me.”

“So I can be redeemed.” She was trying to be snarky but she just sounded hopeful.

“I have to believe that. For Henry.”

“Our son.”

It was the first time Regina had ever said those words. 

“Yeah Regina. Ours.”

 

####

There was that moment. Brief. Painful. Snow had looked her in the eye as her teeth cut through the red skin and white flesh of the apple. For that one moment they’d been in agreement. The war had been set aside. For one moment Snow was at peace and Regina was too. 

A word as simple as “ours” had brought peace to her and Emma.

The girl. The woman. She was smiling. Pleased that they’d agreed.

The problem was Regina knew she was smiling a little too. That she didn’t feel repulsed saying Henry was theirs.

Because Emma had had the choice to run and she’d stayed. For no other reason than to be there for Regina and help her. Regina would have run. She would have felt happy as Bluebeard’s palace disappeared over a hill behind her.

But Emma stayed and held her when she woke from death and didn’t press it when Regina called Henry theirs.

She still sat there. It was such a small moment but they both knew it wasn’t really. Not between the two of them.

One of them smiled.

The other did too.

Regina ducked her head and schooled her face and reached all around her to pull back the pieces of herself that had fallen away. She patched them together in her head and looked up feeling a little more like herself and a little less like a woman that would share her child with Emma Swan.

“So, Sheriff. While I was busy being murdered did you do anything besides sit around and no doubt contribute to the atrocious smell of this cell?”

The smile settled into the default cranky grimace Emma usually flashed. “Sure. I figured a way for us to break out.”

“Really?”

“Really your Majesty.”

“Care to tell me the plan?”

“That depends. You ready to finally explain what the hell this locket is?”

“That’s relevant?”

“It’s magic right? But not like yours and not like whatever Bluebeard does.”

“It’s your magic.”

“Exactly.”

The girl grinned.

Like she really did have a plan.

Like she was smarter than she’d ever let on.

Like they could survive.

Regina had never been more enchanted in her life.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There have been some questions about who is more powerful than whom and where Snow and the rest have been for the last few chapters. Hopefully this answers all your questions, while also, you know, being entertaining and junk.

“I thought you didn’t like magic.”

“I can’t stand it, but I’m magic right?”

Emma was the pure and incandescent sort. 

“Yes.”

“Right. But Bluebeard doesn’t know that.”

“He can sense magic. Just as I can.”

“Yet I’m wearing this locket that you said was a link and I’ve been spending all my time talking and thinking about how much I hate magic.” Emma nodded at Regina. “As far as he’s concerned any magic **I** have is what **you** gave me.”

God. The girl—woman was a genius.

“You’ve been pretending.”

Emma smiled like a cat holding a canary between her paws. “Figured we could us an ace up our sleeve.”

 

####

She thought Regina might have kissed her. She gave her one of her weird soft looks she never gave anyone but Henry and then only when she thought no one could see.

Emma reached up to touch the locket. “It was kind of crazy but I’m teaming up with Peter Pan’s Hook and Snow White’s Evil Queen so crazy seems to kind of be the theme of the day—or year or whatever.”

“It’s not so crazy. You’re the Savior and a product of True Love besides. It only stands to reason you’d possess considerable magic that we could use.”

“Like what happened up on the turret.”

“And in the cave with the centaurs.”

Magic farts. That was her gift. She frowned.

“You look like I’ve killed a beloved pet Miss Swan. This is actually a very good thing.”

“Right. Sure. The magic is good. I’m just—“ thinking about magic farts. Which she couldn’t say. Regina was looking at her like she was smart and saying the words “magic farts” out loud would erase whatever respect the other woman currently had for her.

Though…

Why did it matter if Regina respected her or not? Regina was a sociopath here just so Henry would talk to her. What **she** thought of **Emma** should hardly matter.

She shook her head, “Trying to get my head around it all I guess.” It was the kind of lie she found always worked best. Starting with a truth and moving from there.

Regina came to sit on the bench. She crossed her legs and rearranged her skirts officiously and were it not for the dried blood smeared on her face and staining her torn bodice she would have looked almost…regal.

“If we’re patient and careful your magic can help us.”

“So it wasn’t completely bug nuts?”

“Not at all. You have magic. As I do. As Bluebeard does.”

“And Rumpelstiltskin.”

A polite but frigid smile, “Rumpelstiltskin has the power of all the darkness in this land. It is…different than what you or I can do.”

“So he’s what…a god?”

“An imp is the more appropriate term. But he’s not your concern. Bluebeard should be, because here, in his seat of power, even a god would be daunted.”

“If you’re trying to inspire confidence you really kind of suck at it Madam Mayor.”

Regina pursed her lips. “This will not be easy. I’m simply warning you.” 

“You’ve been doing that since you picked my butt up back in the centaur cave.”

“Yes, and I’m hoping at some point one of these warnings will actually work.”

“And accomplish what? So far you tell me the crap is dangerous and I need to be carefuly and then **you** drag us right into it all. I get it. You’ve been here, you’ve seen things. But I’m not—fragile. You don’t have to put the kid gloves on to handle me.”

“Is that a fact,” she snapped.

“Yeah, it is. Stop repeating yourself all the flipping time and maybe stop treating me like a kid!” Regina just raised her eyebrow—getting all judgy again. Emma inhaled deeply. “Teach me. Okay? Just…tell me what to do.” She reached out to take the other woman’s hand. Maybe a misguided gesture. One a normal person would welcome, but Regina bristled. And her skin, as always, was cool to the touch. Emma ignored it. She knew the truth of it now—and Regina’s magic. Beneath the cold was the warmth of a human being Regina was all to frightened to let out. “You can trust me.”

 

####

Trust.

Like it could be given away so cavalierly.

The hand on hers blazed against her skin and she wondered if she felt as frigid as Emma felt hot. Her eyes searched Emma’s and she knew—she could feel the aggravation pulling her features into something approaching hunger. She leaned in, “Why should I trust you,” she asked. Each word honey dripped slowly from her lips. 

But the vexing woman didn’t back down. She leaned in too. “Because—“

“You’re all I’ve got,” she interrupted her, not needing to hear that statement from Emma. Didn’t need another reminder of how damned alone she was. 

Emma shook her head, “Because we’ve got a kid together. We’re moms, Regina.” That hand squeezed tightly. “Whether you like it or not Henry wants us **both** back. And that means we **have** to trust each other. At least for now.”

This close and in the torch light the every crevice on Emma’s face was highlighted by shadows. Every wrinkle earned in her twenty-eight years. Every scar. The babe Regina had heard the wailing cries of in a castle consumed by a curse had turned into a woman—older perhaps than even the parents that had borne her and matured in the fires of a world where there was no light and dark. Only the maddening gray.

She was not her mother: sheltered and naive and a traitor forged by kindness. She was not her father: determined to be the most noble and good because before he’d been nothing. Emma shucked off the optimism and idealism her parents wore as cloaks. She did not hide behind the black and white morality of their world.

Emma knew the worst of people. And maybe the best. And she was still so. Damned. Good. She could still demand trust after everything. Demand hope after Regina had had her heart ripped from her chest. Emma could still want for something after being beaten by the world Regina had condemned her to. All of the good and optimism that the girl possessed was **earned**.

And there she sat on the bench with her hand on Regina’s. Imploring. 

Regina did not trust. There was no trusting easily. There was only the absence of it. Her whole life had been lived surrounded by liars. Surrounded by the selfish. Some knew what evils they committed and others guised their selfish ways with kindness.

Regina had survived them because she’d learned to catch their every lie. To err on the side of chariness.

“Regina,” Emma said softly. Still begging with soft green eyes for once nothing like her mother’s.

She snatched her hand away—ending the contact and relishing the lack of warmth that came with it. “What would you have me do Sheriff? How might I **prove** I trust you?”

“Maybe teach me how to use this magic crap without being a condescending jackass?”

“I was never a jackass.”

“But you **are** condescending.”

“It’s only condescension if I’m not superior.”

Emma rolled her eyes. She scooted back too, putting distance between them and ending the development of something positively electric that had formed in the space they shared.

Regina hoped her relief wasn’t apparent. It would be the last thing she’d need to explain to Emma.

“Fine Madame Mayor. Sit on that high horse of yours. Enjoy the view, and after Bluebeard’s murdered you a couple of more times we can have this conversation again.”

 

####

Prickly silence overtook the bench they sat on. Regina huffed and acted like she wasn’t being a jackass and Emma kept one hand on the locket and tried to will the other Regina into existence. At least that one would help—when she wasn’t acting like she had a crush on Emma or anything.

Okay maybe not a crush, but compared to the real lady the Regina in her head was practically in **love** with her. And she didn’t hold her at arms length or sit there and sulk and wait to be tortured to death **again** because it was preferable to being nice to Emma.

“Would you stop that?” Regina was pinching the bridge of her nose like she was in pain, but her eyes were on Emma. Or more specifically the locket around her neck.

She defended herself, “I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re thinking so loud I’m about to get actual thoughts instead of just emotions.”

…

“What?”

She motioned to the locket, “That stupid thing created a conduit.” Regina said it so casually. Like ‘oh hey Emma I’m taking Henry to karate class.’ Instead of any of the holy shit factor.

Emma reared back, clasping the locket like her hand would be enough to protect it and the bit of Henry within, “Excuse me?”

Regina sighed again, “I suspected something earlier when I could…hear…you on the streets. Now that I know you have a considerable amount of magic and that I’m stuck in a tiny cell where I can’t even turn without seeing you its become rather unavoidable.”

“The locket has.”

“The link its created.”

But the Regina in her head... “But I was seeing her way before you showed up.”

“Who?”

“The other you.”

Regina raised an eyebrow.

“In my head?”

“You can see me?”

“No. Her.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

She looked around her, “Now?”

“No.”

In a move that shouldn’t have surprised Emma in the least Regina lurched forward to grasp at the locket. “I need to—“

She batted her hands away, “Stop being so grabby damn it!”

“Let me see the locket.”

“Why?”

“To inspect it.”

“But I just told you, I was seeing her way before you gave this to me.”

“When did it start?”

“Couple of days ago. Right before the centaur showed up.”

Regina’s eyes hungrily flitted about as she worked through it in her head. “When I passed into our land from the Middle Kingdom.” She reached for the locket again, but more reverently this time.

“I said enough of the grab hands,” she slapped Regina’s hand away. “Jeeze. Did either of you **ever** learn about respecting personal space?”

 

####

Regina closed her eyes lest she simply attempt to throttle the woman right then and there.

Another approach.

A painful one, wrenched out of her unwillingly.

“The locket has…bound us together Emma. Put you in my head and vice versa.”

She eyed Regina skeptically, “I’m in your head.”

No. Little whispers in a frank and uncouth voice were in her head from time to time. When she was her weakest. She kept her mind guarded enough from invasion that that was all it was.

But Emma. Emma was a powder keg of untapped magic projecting and receiving like the sponge under the kitchen sink.

“After a fashion,” she said finally.

“So…the woman I’m seeing in my head…that’s you?”

How queer was the question. Like there was hope in it. And horror. And relief. And the bewilderment that seemed to be Emma’s de facto course of feeling.

Regina had no idea what Emma was seeing or how much of it was Emma’s own personality attached to Regina like the mental version of Frankenstein’s monster. Stapled together, incongruous, and horrifying. The thing physically manifesting in her could be as brazen and simple as Emma. It could easily laugh at her asides and offer succor when she was anxious.

Or it could be like Regina herself— 

“Because she’s a helluva lot nicer than you your majesty.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She explains this junk instead of treating me like I’m five?”

“I—“

“Pouted for the last hour because I called you on it and risked us both dying rather then being an adult and teaching me.”

She closed her eyes again. Pictured her hands throttling the woman.

It was Emma’s turn to sigh—or groan actually. “And she’s back.”

“Excuse me?”

“Right now. Saying you look like you’re going to murder me. Not that I needed an interpreter. You’re kind of an open book.”

“Really. What am I thinking now?”

Emma grinned.

“Oh grow up.”

“Got a real sailor mouth on that internal monologue don’t you, Regina?”

With one hand Regina pinched her nose. She held the other out, “Just give me the locket.”

Emma wavered long enough for Regina to note it but not long enough for Regina to mention it. Then she slipped the locket over her head and dropped it into Regina’s hand.

It nearly blazed on contact. If it weren’t very much related to magic Regina would have expected to find her own skin blistered from touching it.

“Is she still there?”

“Yeah. And she says that probably hurts. Something about me being too hot to the touch?”

“Could you tell her to kindly shut up?”

“She says she knew you’d say that.”

 

####

The glare Regina shot her was positively **withering**.

“Give her a moment,” the other Regina said, “she’s sorting it all out.”

Emma stood to put space between her and all the Regina’s but scowled at the one in her head. If she already knew the answer…

“I have an i—there it is.”

“She’s me,” the real Regina whispered. “My subconscious. Merging,” well that sounded disgusting, “with yours.”

“She’s the both of us?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” both Reginas said at once.

The real one, pale from her death, continued, “She’s…colored by you and your thoughts. But she’s me. Which means I’d very much appreciate it if you’d ignore her.”

“Or you could stop shooting her into my head.”

“It doesn’t work like that you idiot. Your mind is constantly broadcasting itself. It’s unavoidable, impossible to stop but also impossible to read. This locket bound us together. Gave you the ability to see things I’d really rather you not see.”

“And what? You can see in my head too?”

The Regina in her head snorted.

The real one shuddered, “No, thankfully. It’s easier to invade a mind then to read it. Rumpelstiltskin taught me how to protect mine.”

“So no obnoxious—“

The head Regina took offense.

“—Subconscious Emmas floating around?”

“The only bright side to this predicament.”

“I can think of some other bright spots,” head Regina said coyly.

Like…

Emma really didn’t want to say it because she didn’t like putting labels on things—especially things like what head Regina was doing but… “Could you **please** tell your subconscious not to hit on me?”

Regina flushed a red deep enough to match the burgundy of Emma’s shirt. “You could just shut her off yourself.”

“How.”

“Think,” one Regina said.

“Hard,” the other finished.

 

####

Emma turned as pale as her idiot mother. A lesser woman would have let her then fall to the ground and pass out. 

In spite of herself Regina darted across the tiny cell to catch her. “Well don’t give yourself an aneurysm in the process!”

Emma shook her head, “Sorry. You two were talking at the same time or funny or something and then,” she grew weak again.

Regina manhandled her back over to the bench and knelt in front of her. “This isn’t difficult,” she complained.

“You’re not the one seeing double.”

True enough. Regina had enough difficultly with one voice in her head, she could only imagine what it would be like to have two. To be the egregious Miss Swan with a clever Regina pointing out her flaws would have to be misery.

Her mind darted back to her own lessons in closing her mind off.

“There are two entrances dearies. Only one can truly be closed,” he’d said with his usual flourish.

“But what if I need to close the other?” At the time she’d been thinking of Rumpelstiltskin and how he might sort out her thoughts. Read them like a book. It was before she knew the truth of him. Before she knew he’d read her tale before she’d even known it had been written.

His smile hadn’t wavered. “Focus.”

In her mind’s eyes she saw them always as two gates. One she kept latched closed with ease. Nary a though filtered in. Not until Emma and the locket took an axe to it. She’d sorted that problem out easily enough. Which left the other door. The one through which her thoughts escaped. The one that meant this girl born to power but with no understanding of it could converse with a part of herself even Regina avoided.

“What are you—“

She place her hands on Emma’s knees and squeezed. “I need silence.”

Emma just assumed that meant whispering, “What the hell are you doing?”

Trying to help.

There was no handle with which to grasp the gate. It was heavy but the flow of her thoughts were heavier still.

“Regina—“

She squeezed again. Winced at the pressure in her head. Stopping the flow of her thoughts. Keeping all of that in. Clutching her subconscious instead of letting it escape. It was painful. A miserable headache that spread across the front of her mind and pulsated in time with the beating of her heart.

“Is she still with us,” she asked.

“No,” the other woman responded softly.

She sagged against Emma’s knees and couldn’t even muster alarm when Emma’s hand went to her hair. 

“You didn’t kill her did you?”

She laughed, and regretted the reverberation of pain that rang through her head, “No. I simply locked her away.”

“Thought you said that was impossible.”

She looked up through the fringe of her hair, a proud smile on her face, “Not for me.”

 

####

Regina thumped her on the back of the head and Emma had to bite her lip so she didn’t smack her back.

“Concentrate!”

The woman had done some impossible hoo-doo in her own head and it had her feeling optimistic enough that she’d insisted on teaching Emma how to do the mind gate thingy too.

She’d even given her the locket of Henry’s hair back.

“It’ll help you concentrate.”

She’d held it up like is stank, “How?”

“It’s imprinted with my magic and it makes the conduit more potent. As long as I keep my thoughts to myself it will work primarily as a focusing tool for you. Like a blueprint.”

It was a bunch of horse shit.

Or hokum.

Or something that didn’t make her sound like a sixty-something Southerner.

Regina thumped her again.

“You do that one more time—“

“And you’ll threaten me and try to distract us both from the task at hand. Now focus.”

So again she closed her eyes and visualized the stupid gate that was supposed to be the entrance to her brain and she closed it and used one of those really good locks to lock it and shoved the key down her pants and then flipped Regina the bird for good measure.

“Is it working?”

“Are there two of me?”

She cracked an eyelid. The Regina from her head should have been standing behind the real thing being snarky. Only, “just one of you.”

Regina smiled. Another of the increasingly frequent genuine ones. Then she sort of **breathed** and just how she seemed to make it a thing probably meant it was magic.

“And now?”

“Still one.”

Then she actually deflated with relief enough that Emma was reminded that just a couple of hours ago the woman had been dead. She sure as hell looked it. “Finally.”

“Oh like it took you less than a day to learn how to do this.”

“It took me half an hour.”

“But you probably had help. Books or some crap.”

Regina shrugged noncommittally then sank back onto the bench.

Emma considered asking her how she felt. Or offering a thigh as a pillow or to find some water or something, but Regina would just get all frigid again. Instead Emma stretched her legs out in front of her, crossed her arms, and stared at the bars that kept them locked up. The physical manifestation of a prison Regina insisted they were stuck in.

“You’re not prepared,” she said three times already. “Not to break us out of here and I don’t have the energy.”

She could have slept. They’d had whole hours to themselves. The sun had risen judging from the gray light in the hall outside their cell. So far there’d been no sign of their captor or any of his golems or pirates. Just her and Regina. Starving. Thirsty. And basically screwed until she figured out how to do more than the mind gate thing.

For the very first time since being caught she allowed herself to really return to the night before and examine it—examine the moment when magic had exploded out of her and saved her life.

Warm magic. Easy. Filled with equal parts love and anger. Difficult to grasp. Slippery like a fish fresh from the water. But something tangible all the same. Something boiling up from within her.

Nothing like the darkness at Regina’s beck and call. The oily blackness that had slid across her skin when they’d escaped the centaurs and chilled her to the bone at every turn.

“Regina,” she asked, and the other woman looked up from where she’d been trying to hide her attempt at sleep, “what’s magic supposed to feel like?”

Regina blinked sleepily, “I suppose,” she tilted her head, “I’ve never thought too deeply about it before.”

“Is it all the same?”

“No. There are many kinds of magic.”

“So you do the ice stuff—“ Regina smiled and Emma thought of the fireballs she’d seemed lobbed about. Ironic that such heat could come from so cold a place. “And Bluebeard. He does blood magic?”

Regina sighed. “It’s the emotions of magic that effects it. The fairies have their dust, Rumpelstiltskin has his dagger, but that’s just the fuel, like whats within you and I. The feelings that conjure it, those are what matter most.”

“So what conjures your magic?”

“I expect the very opposite of what conjures yours Miss Swan.”

 

####

“We could escape right now.”

“We could not.”

“But I’m learning.”

“You protected your mind from invasion. That’s hardly enough to deal with a blood sorcerer in his own lair.”

“So we wait.”

“We survive Miss Swan. Bide our time.”

“You’re saying that because you’re barely awake as is.”

A yawn.

“Yes, well dying and being resurrected and then teaching an idiot magic does tend to wear one down.”

 

####

They came for them in the late evening when Regina was faint from lack of food or water and dark circles had taken up residence beneath Emma’s eyes. She’d stayed awake even when Regina dozed. The knight errant standing watch. Or sitting watch in Miss Swan’s case.

Regina had closed her eyes while resting her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees and woken to find herself laid out on the bench with her head perilously close to the other woman’s thigh.

It was two pirates who came. Emma acted like she might fight, but Regina warned her with a touch. It wasn’t the time. The girl wasn’t ready. **Regina** wasn’t ready. Her heart rattled in her chest like its forced removal had knocked something loose.

Then the pirates, two grubby men she’d just as soon choke then look at, held out rusty heavy chains. She’d shared a look with Emma. The girl—the sheriff’s lips curled into a smile. Then they both shot back equal looks of condemnation that had made both men flush. They’d backed away warily from them. Frightened as any two men might be.

When they returned it was with a putrid golem. Its stench inundated the tiny cell and its queer eyes cast the pall of Bluebeard’s magic on them both long enough for her to feel the chains clamp around her wrists.

Rage, the only bit of her unfettered, boiled within. She’d sworn she’d never be shackled again. An oath whispered in the night to no one but herself. She didn’t know how, but Bluebeard would pay. He’d pay with an ounce of flesh and whatever was left of his soul.

“Too bad you can’t shoot laser outta your eyes there Madam Mayor,” Emma murmured, “because yikes.”

“I don’t like shackles.”

Emma raised her own wrists, “Right there with you,” she said flippantly.

A guise though. The woman’s way to hide the hurt. Regina had seen her do it enough since they’d met. Regina hadn’t been the only one locked up—the only one to find her fate in the hands of another.

God. How cruel had she been to extend that fate to others too? To Rumpelstiltiskin’s little toy and the devoted silly genie and—

No. God no. She would not think of it.

Not now. Not when they were being led up narrow stairs to Bluebeard’s great hall. She was about to be flayed alive. Or boiled. Or torn apart. Wretchedness was just behind the door she marched towards and she would not face it melancholic from contemplation.

She squared her shoulders. Pulled the pieces of herself around her like a shroud. Lifted her chin.

Stepped through the door.

And into a room as boisterous as the night before. Pirates crowed. Stomped. Howled. It was a cacophony of drunken buffoons who laughed and jostled and ridiculed with nothing more than their unworthy eyes and virulent tongues.

On the dais Bluebeard sat like a lord.

He was a lord.

A duke.

But there he sat the king of the dredges.

Regina gave him her nastiest smile and watched the anger darken his skin. This had been his punishment. She became a mayor of the best of their world. He became a lord of the worst.

Hook stood to Bluebeard’s left, and he actually had the decency to look alarmed. “I’m teaming up with Peter Pan’s Hook and Snow White’s Evil Queen,” Emma had said. Like Hook was still part of the plan. With his wide blue eyes and pale pallor Regina was half tempted to believe it.

It was the guests to Bluebeard’s right that were of the greater concern. Snow White, and the princess Aurora and that terrifyingly capable warrior Mulan.

Armed. Cleaned. Dressed. Rested. Unshackled.

Of course. Bluebeard despised Regina, but Snow White was the daughter of his dearest friend. Even in this world twisted by nearly thirty years of his rule he’d still pay her honors. Still treat her like a queen.

“Say nothing,” she urged Emma.

She had to hope Snow would be just as clever as her suddenly mute daughter. This. This was their chance. If he didn’t know she and Snow were working together to get back home, if he didn’t know that it was Snow White’s daughter standing beside Regina, then they’d have knowledge he didn’t not, and they’d have friends on the outside.

Or at least associates married together by necessity. 

 

####

Mary Margaret using a bow like she was Robin Hood and a sword like King Arthur had been bad enough. Mary Margaret standing up on a stand besides that monster and looking haughty as hell was short circuiting Emma’s brain.

“Say nothing,” Regina demanded in a quiet rush.

Right.

Escape. If Mary Margaret was standing up there like she was the guy’s friend than maybe Emma staying quiet could help. One thing she’d learned in foster care was that it paid to stay quiet. When you had a scary guy like Bluebeard glaring down at you you had to let on as little as possible. 

Hopefully Mary Margaret could make up some story and she and Regina could go along with it and then they could all get the hell out of the skeeviest Dodge she’d ever found herself in.

Aurora opened her mouth, but Mulan was quick get to whatever the hell they were all attempting and quieted her with a touch.

“You see,” boomed Bluebeard, “your mortal enemy broken and in shackles.”

Mary Margaret tore her eyes from Emma and gave Regina a glare more frigid than any magic. “She hardly looks broken.”

“That pride of hers **is** pesky,” Bluebeard agreed, “I could rip it from her for you? Flay it off of her?”

Mary Margaret actually seemed to consider it. 

“No, I’d prefer to do it myself.” 

Then she smiled like some kind of devil and Emma chanced a glance at Regina to make sure she wasn’t the only one kind of scared by the usually very nice and meek school teacher. 

“While her friend watches would be best.”

Bluebeard mirrored the smile, “Yes. The little friend. She must care deeply to partner with her.”

“My stepmother has always been fond of her solitude.”

Regina’s lips were pulled into a tight grimace. Her dark eyes following Mary Margaret like…like a predator.

“I guess I’m just a fun kind of lady,” Emma chanced to say. Mary Margaret with her creepy play at evil and Bluebeard with his genuine malevolence dragged their eyes away from Regina to focus on her.

“Why do you partner with that evil witch,” Bluebeard asked.

“Because she’s not even the most evil thing in this room.”

A bark of laughter escaped Regina’s throat. “It would seem I’m not the only one to know the truth of you dear Duke. Her. Your beloved Donkeyskin. We all know what you are. It’s a wonder **anyone** would treat with you.”

The rush of silence was preceded only by a lurching sensation as she and Regina were both cast into the air. She wasn’t being hung by anything. There wasn’t an invisible hook or the tightness of magic’s grip. She was simply not on the ground.

Then. Then Bluebeard squeezed.

Mary Margaret spoke urgently to Bluebeard but all Emma could hear was the blood rushing in her ears as every vein seemed to close all of a sudden. She couldn’t breath or move and even her heart seemed to stop.

Aurora’s hand went to her mouth. Mulan and Hook both reached for swords at their sides. Bluebeard kept squeezing. Mary Margaret kept begging.

And Regina. Regina laughed.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The feedback continues to be awesome and amazing. Thank you so much! If you’ve got questions you can hit me up on Tumblr.

Bluebeard swung his arm downward like hammering a nail into rotted wood and Emma and Regina both tumbled to the ground, landing painfully on their knees. Bones and joints cracked loudly on the roughly hewn stone. Immediately the tension that had turned the room silent dissipated. Someone laughed. Another. The riotous noise of Bluebeard’s never ending party of thieves and degenerates reemerged.

On the dais Mary Margaret smiled coyly at the man and dragged her finger down his arm. It was every bit as bad as the sword and bow and nasty smile she’d directed at Regina.

But Emma was too busy gasping for air to let it worry her.

“You really desire them so much,” Bluebeard was asking Mary Margaret.

“She killed my mother, and the other one sided with her in the other land. Protected her.”

“I have powers my dear Snow. Ways to torture them beyond your understanding.”

“And I am grateful for the offer my friend, but this night, just this one night, I’d like them to myself. I wish to watch them shiver and weep while I sleep. Watch them suffer while I am safe. It’ll drive her as mad as any torture you devise.”

He took her small hand in his, dwarfing it with his size, and brought the pale knuckles to his azure lips. “For the child of my dearest friend it is the least I can do.”

Mary Margaret smiled gently enough that Emma could relax. Her friend—her mother—was still there. Just way way way too good at playing a horrible person.

The others on the dais seemed to relax too. Hook and Mulan taking in the whole scene warily and Aurora going completely quiet. She shivered and Mulan touched her elbow in comfort.

It was kind of sweet how the two of them had bonded off doing something that involved not being used like a piñata by a crazy serial killer.

Regina had found enough breath to laugh again. “Please. Just kill me again dear duke. Rip out my heart. It’s preferable to her simpering and this maudlin reunion.”

“Silence,” he growled. The groups of drunken pirates closest to them actually obeyed.

But Regina honest to god cackled, “If I’d known she had so many father figures I wouldn’t have stopped with just Leopold.”

Mary Margaret covered her mouth in horror and Bluebeard charged across the space intent on choking the life right out of her.

With her torn dress and her eyes so bright against the dirt and dried blood on her face Regina looked insane. Terrifyingly insane. Never let her near Henry again insane.

“I will not kill you,” he whispered even with his hands around her neck. “No, you will be her slave Regina. Subject to her every will.” 

Regina’s eyes only grew brighter. More mad.

He squeezed. Veins of lurid red snaked out across his skin and between his fingers, “As long as you are in my domain your magic is lost to you girl. You’re nothing but withered flotsam. Doomed to trail her until the end of your days.”

He stepped back and let her drop again. But now a vibrant bruise ran like a choker around her neck, undulating as she coughed and fought to breathe again.

“Unchain the harlot,” he commanded, “she’s powerless now.”

A betting woman would have disagreed. Whatever Bluebeard had done to Regina had wakened something vicious in her eyes. Paired with that madness Emma had to shudder.

“And send them back down to their cell. When the queen retires for the evening they are to be brought to her. Understood?”

It wasn’t a pirate, but a golem that nodded. Moaning an affirmative that flipped Emma’s stomach. Regina’s chains were removed and she walked beside Emma slowly. Shuffling really.

“You okay?”

“I am alive. That’s more than enough.”

In the shadows of the hall Regina was a wolf, and her smile as terrifying as the golem at their back. 

 

####

Water and hard bread was waiting for them back in the cell. Regina daintily picked up a piece and gnawed on it, conscious of Emma’s confused gaze.

“You said be quiet and then you poked the guy. Any reason?”

“Bluebeard has an image of me I’d rather he maintain.”

“He was ready to kill you.”

“He would have brought me back.”

“You don’t think it was maybe a big and really stupid gamble?”

Regina shrugged. She dipped her bread into the water to soften it and took another bite. It was almost too sour to be edible and the water was brackish making it all the more unappealing. 

“As far as Bluebeard is concerned I’m an insane queen who has never held my tongue. If I demurred in the least he would have suspected something, especially with the **good** Snow White begging to have me all alone so she could torture me?”

“Okay, maybe but—“

“But we survived. For now Emma, that’s what’s important.”

“Right. We survived. And now you have a lovely choker. Very 2000.”

Her hands went to her throat. It hurt a little still and it had made her voice raspy.

“What he do anyway?”

“Bound my magic.”

“With a bruise?”

Did she **really** need to explain blood magic again?

Her fingers traced what she presumed was livid skin. She couldn’t see it, and it didn’t feel any different beneath the pads of her fingers. The change was all internal. “I told you, in this palace he is a god. It’s why we tried to escape before he noticed.”

“Which turned out so well, especially the part where we got caught and he killed you. And this next time it’s all gonna be on me isn’t it? He said you’d be magic-less or whatever as long as you were here.”

“Precisely.”

“So…we’re pretty much screwed aren’t we?”

For a prophesied savior Emma Swan inspired very little confidence. It forced Regina into the uncomfortable position of optimist. “No, my dear. We are anything but.”

“Care to explain.”

“I’ve no desire to repeat myself. I’ll explain when we see Mary Margaret. For now. Rest. You’ll need it.”

 

####

Emma didn’t just rest. She conked out. Slept so hard she forgot where she was when she woke up two hours later. It made her grateful for all that time in prison. They’d taught her how to appreciate a good book in there, and sleep through anything.

Regina was still on the bench beside her, legs crossed regally and mouth pursed in thought. She didn’t pull her eyes from the door, “Did you sleep all right?”

“You know, well enough I guess.”

“Well rested?”

She shrugged. “How long’s it been?”

“Approximately two hours.”

She rolled off the bench and stretched, tightly wound neck and shoulders popping in relief. “They’re still going?”

“Bluebeard’s regular evening gala appears to be quite festive.”

“More like a frat party.”

“Been to a great many of those Miss Swan?”

“As a bounty hunter sure. Wouldn’t have been caught dead at one as a kid.”

“You don’t care for the Greek system.”

Emma snorted, “What the hell do you know about fraternities?”

“I researched a great deal when Henry came into my life. The Greek system appears to be an important part of a boy’s life in college.”

“Maybe in Animal House.”

Regina didn’t correct her.

“Regina…is everything you know about college from Animal House?”

She picked at her skirt, “Of course not.”

“Little Revenge of the Nerds thrown in?”

“It’s not like I had an opportunity to go traipsing about America’s many fine campuses.”

“You know, I just realized, you spent all this time acting like you are better than me and yet you don’t even have a college degree.”

Regina finally turned to her. Not with the blazing rage she’d directed at Bluebeard. It was a much milder for of irritation. “There wasn’t a lot of time to go to college when I was being married off before I was even twenty.”

She jabbed her thumb at herself, “Child mom, and child bride. When we get back we could pitch ourselves as a reality show. Prove to them Mary Margaret’s my mom even though she’s like a year younger than me and TLC will pick us up in a heartbeat.”

Amazingly Regina didn’t call her an idiot. Sure there was still a little contempt there, but the corners of her mouth twitched up a fraction.

A smile.

The smallest of smiles.

Barely even there.

But there. Definitely there.

Because of Emma.

 

####

It was the deplorable Hook that leaned against the bars of the cell door. He casually rested his elbow on the bars and picked at his nails with his hook. 

“You do know how to antagonize your majesty. Bluebeard’s face was as blue as that beard.”

Because that was so original.

Emma crossed her arms, “And he sent you down here to get us?”

“He trusts me.”

“The good duke isn’t very bright is he,” Regina asked.

Hook grinned, “No. I wouldn’t say he is. He didn’t even notice the way that Middle Kingdom woman went for her sword. Or how concerned Snow White looked when he was about to off her daughter in front of her.”

Emma was confused by that particular revelation, “How do you—“

“Know about your mother?” He waved his hook at Regina, “Because of her mother darling. Before she showed up and I was tasked with recovering her the plan was to manipulate you and yours.”

Regina kept her face still, careful not to reveal anything. Emma had apparently come to some sort of arrangement with the pirate. She wasn’t being her usual brash self and telling the supposed traitor to go sit on “it.” But Regina was a bit more wary. The pirate had betrayed her twice now, and he’d willingly sided with her mother.

All to get at Rumpelstiltskin. It was whomever offered him the easiest path to the imp, and right now in their cell they were not it.

She stood and let the skirts of her dress bloom around her, “And now you’re here, smiling. Eager to help free us.”

“You’re my path to the crocodile.”

“Bluebeard couldn’t offer you a route?”

“Told me if I even looked at the slippers he’d gouge my eyes out with a spoon.”

That sounded on par.

Emma raised her hand like a polite school child, “Uh, slippers?”

Right. Silver sparkly slippers. Their path home and silly enough that she’d neglected to explain them to Emma before. “Like Dorothy’s,” she explained, “only silver.”

“So…the Wizard of Oz.”

“Is an ass.”

She blinked rapidly before shaking her head. “Right. Of course. Is there any character from a movie that **doesn’t** exist?”

“I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Harry Potter.” Though Henry would have been delighted if Harry Potter existed. He’d probably have run away to Hogwarts and refused to ever come home. Even the promise of Emma wouldn’t have dissuaded him.

Emma dragged her hand over her face, “And you’d probably become best friends with Voldemort.”

“Why on earth would I be friends with a man defeated by a **teenager**? That would be like defending either of those wicked witches.”

“There’s more than one?”

“East and West, love. Everyone knows that,” Hook interrupted, “Can we get back to the bit where I escort you two upstairs?”

Regina shrugged, “I suppose we have no choice. Lead on Captain. Though I’d prefer you **not** at my back.”

“If I wanted to kill you your Majesty I’d just ask Bluebeard. He’s holding a contest tomorrow. Best idea for most painful death gets to help him with your next one.”

She was actually curious to hear what sort of ideas the degenerates at Bluebeard’s beck and call would come up with. She had to admit that getting to kill a person over and over again and discovering precisely what was the most painful and grisly held a certain…academic appeal.

“Regina,” Emma muttered, “please tell me you’re not trying to figure out what death plan would win.”

“You aren’t a little curious?”

“I mean, maybe, but I’m also not the one they’d be doing it to.”

“The queen here probably has a bit of a masochist streak in her. Don’t you love?”

She shoved him ahead of her, “Keep walking Hook or I’ll be happy to show you my sadist streak.”

 

####

Regina spent a month in a half in the quarters Bluebeard had given Snow. It was early in her marriage to Leopold and he’d insisted on her joining him in a trip to his dearest friend’s home. She’d dined with his wife and daughter and gone hawking and riding most every day. At night she’d lie in the bed with the stench of his magic all around her and try to drown out the screams she knew were being pulled from dying girls far below.

She’d mentioned her suspicions to her husband just once. He’d looked so funny for a moment and then insisted that Bluebeard was a good and honest man. It was magic or a remarkable ability for self-deception. Regina never bothered to learn which. They left Bluebeard’s castle and she worked hard to avoid him ever after.

Being back in the room tugged her back to her youth. For a scant second she regretted never dealing with the monster earlier. She could have avoided the room. And the reunion therein.

The room was dark, but supple and clean. Lavish and unmarked by the years. The reunion, in the glow of the roaring fire in the hearth, and watched by Regina, Hook, Mulan and Maleficent’s little foe, was cloying.

Snow’s face screwed up in agony and she clutched Emma to her and tried not to cry, chancing a second or two to scowl at Regina as though she’d imprisoned the other woman herself.

Emma stood wooden in her mother’s arms, finally stiffly putting her arms around her. 

Of course. To her Snow was still a roommate. Not a mother. Or maybe she was a mother. One who’d abandoned her to a thankless world for twenty-eight years.

“Touching,” she said out loud.

Snow scowled again. Emma then squeezed her mother’s arm, instantly soothing the woman. “What the hell happened to you guys?”

“Cora was waiting for us.”

Her mother. She steeled her jaw. It wasn’t the time. Thinking about her would only distract her. They needed to escape her mother. Flee the land before she found them. Then she’d be stuck. Without the compass or the magic spell Regina possessed she’d never make it to their world. She’d need…she’d need a whole curse of her own to get there.

“But you got the compass,” she insisted.

The three women shared a look that told her they hadn’t. Of course not. Give Snow White the simplest of tasks and she couldn’t complete it. Maybe if she’d lashed Charming to a stick and hung him out in front of the idiot.

“How could you possibly have failed?”

“Because your mother was **waiting**. She knew we were coming.”

Everyone swung back around to stare at Regina. “You think I told her. The woman I banished to another land nearly forty years ago and haven’t seen since? Why would I possibly do that?”

“She’s your mother,” Snow said simply.

Regina laughed, “Of course. You know as well as I do Snow. Not everyone can have a **saint** for a mother.”

“Okay, can we maybe calm down a second here,” Emma interjected. She physically stepped between them, her hands almost outstretched—her fingers scant inches from Regina. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Regina didn’t warn the woman.” Snow opened her mouth to protest, but Emma quickly continued, “I trust her. On this? Keeping Henry safe? I trust her Mary Margaret. If she says she didn’t warn Cora I believe her.”

The girl who never stayed. The one that moved and moved and moved. Flitted across a continent or two in a mad drive to escape a past she knew not. Who was supposed to have been in Storybrooke only a week. She wore her solitude like armor—like Regina did. Her distrust for everyone and everything had almost endeared her to Regina. It separated her from her winsome parents.

Yet somehow when it came to Henry Regina had earned her trust. Won something never given and never asked for. She stared at the blond with no small amount of wonder and almost missed Snow’s question.

“Then how did Cora know we were there?”

Hook wagged a bejeweled finger, “If I may, Cora had planned on getting the compass before she even knew your lot was in the Enchanted Forest. According to her it’s the only way to find the path to this magic-less land.”

Regina swept her arm in his direction like presenting a prize, “Satisfied Snow?”

“She is,” Emma said. And she turned back to face her mother and shared some silent conversation full of contorting eyebrows and wide eyes and barely parted lips.

Snow backed down with a grimace and the other princess, the youngest one there, took the opportunity to make herself known, “This still leaves us all in a predicament doesn’t it?”

Mulan agreed, “Aurora’s right. We’re now all stuck in here with Bluebeard and Cora’s out there with the compass and the wardrobe ash. There’s nothing stopping her from escaping this land.”

“Yes, there is.” She knew her mother well. Far better than anyone else in the room. “Me. She won’t leave without me.”

“Bully for you love.”

“Regina’s not leaving without us Hook,” Emma reminded him, “so it’s really not that big of a concern.”

“The concern is my mother, who **will** want to find me, and Bluebeard, who will not let Emma and I leave this castle alive.”

“I was surprised to even find him here,” Snow said. “Why wasn’t he cursed like everyone else?”

“Because I didn’t want that particular monster in my paradise.”

“Bluebeard is—“

“Yes, Snow, please try to defend the man that murders all of his wives, tried to rape his own daughter, runs a pirate kingdom and tortured your daughter in front of you not two hours ago.”

“He was never like that before.”

“He was. You and your father just chose not to see it.”

Snow’s lower jaw jutted out in annoyance, but she closed her eyes and took a moment. “Fine. So…how do you propose we escape Regina?”

 

####

They were all looking at her. Hook kind of looked bored and seemed to just being doing it because everyone else was. Mulan and Aurora just looked curious. Regina looked…intense and Mary Margaret…her eyes kept flitting back over to Regina.

“You’re not using my daughter as bait,” she said.

Emma cringed. It was still really **really** weird to hear Mary Margaret call her her daughter. She got it. Understood it as soon as she’d seen her face sort of crack on Main Street after the curse broke. There was no mistaking all the maternal feelings. Just like there was no avoiding David and his paternal hug.

But getting that they were her parents and actually having it all work out in her brain were two way different things. So she cringed, and Mary Margaret tried not to flinch, and Regina preened because apparently anything that hurt Mary Margaret was a-okay by her.

Then she said, “Emma won’t be bait. She’s our escape plan.”

“I am?”

“She is?”

“You are.”

Hook asked, “How’s she the plan exactly?”

“She has magic.”

Mary Margaret looked at Emma with another of her unnerving looks that never wavered and seemed to be full of…wonder or something. “Magic?”

“Yes Snow. Your daughter appears to be brimming with it, and our host has no idea.”

“A surprise attack,” Mulan asked.

“An ace up our sleeve.” Emma’s earlier words sounded so sly coming from Regina.

“Except all I’ve done is launch a few golems back and startle Regina in a cave. How’s that supposed to translate to an escape?”

“And we still need the slippers,” Hook reminded them.

Crap. The stupid reason they broke into the place in the first place. No slippers. No magic oomph. No getting home.

“Snow can get them,” Mulan declared with way too much confidence. Everyone rounded on her, but she was unfazed, “Our host insisted that if she needed anything she only had to ask. She can ask for the slippers.”

“The ones Regina and I got caught stealing from him. You don’t think that might be a little suspicious?”

“No, no she’s right,” Mary Margaret said, “I would need them for the same reason as Regina. To get home.”

“If it was that frickin’ easy why didn’t we go up the beanstalk and they get the slippers?”

All eyes swung back to Regina. “Because he won’t just hand them over,” she protested. 

“He will to me.”

“Remember this moment Snow. When you are in chains down in that cell with Emma and I remember this and remember how wrong you were.”

Man. If Mary Margaret was right Regina was gonna have to eat a whole mess of crow and would be a nightmare. But if she was wrong they were going to have to deal with Regina gloating for the next twenty years. And also be screwed even more than they already were.

“Okay,” it was probably best to keep the conversation moving so Regina and Mary Margaret wouldn’t keep trying to kill each other with eye daggers. “So Mary Margaret will just **ask** for the slippers tomorrow. Then what? I poof us out of here?”

“Hook will free us from the cell.”

“Will I?”

“Yes,” Regina growled. “You will free us. Emma will then use her magic to hide us from Bluebeard’s magic. Then, should Snow White succeed, we will meet her on the other side of the wall.”

“Wait a minute,” Hook interjected, “you expect me to put my life in the hands of her magic? When she’s never so much as conjured a fireball?”

“Yes,” Regina and Mary Margaret said at once. Equal measures of confidence and pride in their voices. The line between friend and family blurring for both of them. It was bad enough having Mary Margaret for a mom all of a sudden. But Regina too? And she didn’t sound like a mom, or a sister, or a great grand-whatever the hell she was probably technically.

She’d sounded like…

Nope. 

Nope. Emma wasn’t going to consider it. Wasn’t going to think about Regina. Wasn’t going to think about Regina and family but not really relationship thingys. She had to deal with magic. **That** was what she had to focus on. Conjuring—whatever out of thin air.

 

####

They spent the next hour and a half plotting the upcoming day’s events. Snow and Mulan insisted on half a dozen contingency plans and between the two of them plotted every last bit of minutiae.

That is except for perhaps the most critical part of the plan apart from Snow acquiring the shoes. Emma’s magic.

Regina had provided little advice and Snow had asked for little. Instead she’d spent her time making use of the hot water piped into Snow’s bathroom and cleaned the dried blood off of her face and chest. What was hers and what was the dead girl’s had all blended into a flaky mess. Though she supposed the blacker bits of dried blood were her own. Being black hearted and all.

The girl, Aurora, found her and offered to help mend her ripped dress. They split up the duties with Aurora mending the undershirt and Regina working on the more difficult bodice.

Emma wandered in and promptly averted her eyes like a farm boy walking in on unrobed royalty. It might have had something to do with Regina wearing little more than a blanket while they worked.

“You gonna put those away anytime soon your majesty?”

“When the girl’s finished repairing my blouse.”

“I’m sure we could find you an actual shirt.”

“I’m sure you’re the only one bothered sheriff.”

Aurora tucked her head down like a good little princess and continued to sew, her fingers deft and sure. Emma took a seat on the edge of the bathtub behind Regina and watched them both.

“Sewings kind of a big deal here huh?” She rested her chin on her fist. “Like for princesses and junk?”

“One must be a domestic goddess to be a suitable wife,” Regina said sweetly.

Aurora, virtually mute since Regina had first seen her, spoke up, “It was actually outlawed in my kingdom. All our clothing and other woven goods were manufactured elsewhere.”

Watching Emma puzzle that out almost made up for having to sit through the conversation as a whole. “Why…was it outlawed?”

And she hadn’t quite succeeded.

“The curse? An evil witch cursed me to die from the prick of a finger.”

Not entirely accurate. Though it was probably Maleficent who had perpetuated that myth. She so loved to play with peoples’ conception of magic. In reality it had just been a sleeping curse. The same one that she’d used on Snow White. It put the victim into a sleep so deep it seemed as though death had claimed them, and cast their mind into a dark and terrifying world inescapable but for True Love’s kiss.

Her needle froze mid-stroke.

A world she’d condemned her own son to.

Not on purpose.

She drove the needle through thick fabric.

The curse had been meant for Emma. Not for Henry. Henry should have never even **seen** that turnover. Should never have seen that woman. Should never have been…

Did he have the nightmares too? Did he wake up screaming in the night with only **David Nolan** for comfort? 

And here she was at a sewing party with Sleeping Beauty and Emma Swan and her mortal enemy was on the other side of the door plotting her escape. Her rescue.

A warm hand on her bare shoulder yanked her out of the mire seeping up from the dark recesses of her thoughts. She jerked away from Emma’s touch—so confident and gentle all at once.

“Woah, sorry Mrs. Jumpy.” Good. Emma sounded irritated. “I was just asking if you were gonna teach me how to do this stupid spell thing for tomorrow and you kept staring at that needlework.”

“It’s excellent work,” Aurora observed.

“My needlework has always been exceptional.”

“It’s okay,” Emma hitched her thumb at Aurora, “I still can’t get over Aurora over here choosing sewing for her teenage rebellion years.”

“Well, she **could** have killed herself.”

“What was your rebellious stage Emma? Drinking all the boys under the table and the belching lewdly in their faces.” And Sleeping Beauty had a tongue as sharp as that needle of hers. 

Regina smirked, and Emma proved Aurora’s prediction true when she just blushed and said nothing for a moment before finally claiming, “All twenty-six letters of the alphabet **and** I could shotgun beer better than most of the guys I knew.” Few women could actually sound **proud** making such a claim.

“I am so thankful Aurora has no idea what shotgunning beer entails or I’d be embarrassed for you Miss Swan.”

“All twenty-six letters?”

“Even backwards.”

The Savior.

Where was Snow White to appreciate the child she’d brought into the world? A woman who could belch an alphabet backwards. Regina actually felt a little insulted that it was **Emma Swan** who broke the curse. She’d always planned on her being so much more…Snow White and Prince Charming-esque. With a flare for condescension and a nose tilted towards the ceiling. 

Emma swatted her own stomach loudly, and far too proudly, “But enough about how I was clearly a better rebellious teenager than either of you. Magic. You’ve got to teach me some? Preferably involving fireballs and invisibility.”

“The invisibility would be rather moot the moment you accidentally set your self on fire don’t you think?”

Aurora ducked her head and snickered at Regina’s remark. She found herself actually feeling a fondness for the girl.

One disturbingly matched, and even surpassed, by her growing fondness for Emma Swan.

 

####

Clearly Regina refrained from teaching her about fireballs because she knew Emma would have lobbed one at her fat head in short order.

She really **really** wish she’d taught her that spell first. Half-naked (how long did it take to sew?) and singed would have been a good look for the evil queen.

Emma darted out of the bathroom and back into the main room, where Mary Margaret and Mulan were messing with bows and arrows and Hook was sharpening his hook.

Regina chased after her, the blanket clutched one handed around her naked torso. A sight Hook did not fail to notice.

“Patience please,” she intoned. **Again**.

“This is stupid. **You’re** stupid. The **plan** is stupid,” Emma shot back. Because really. **Magic**? Asking her to use magic and save the day? Epically stupid.

Mary Margaret stood up, “What’s goin—“

“You’re daughter is losing her nerve.”

Hook laughed. “Not the only one who’s lost something.” He was still staring at Regina’s barely concealed chest and again Emma was kind of glad she didn’t have fireballs at her beck and call because big one. Right at his face. Mulan glared stonily at him until he stopped laughing and nervously returned to messing with his hook.

“I’m not losing my nerve—“ She totally was. She was losing it big time. Because every once in a while the sheer ridiculousness of what was happening would sneak up on her and bludgeon her head. She couldn’t escape it. Or the people. Or the magic that was apparently just sort of **in** her.

“You are,” Regina shot back. “And we can’t afford that.”

“If Emma doesn’t want to do it…”

“We’re dead. Barring an enormous distraction Emma is our only hope to escape.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t antagonized the Duke into cutting you off from your magic.”

“Yes, lecture me, Snow. This is really the time for it.”

“How about nobody lecture anybody,” Emma said. “Seriously. How about we just…we find a plan that isn’t about magic?”

“Why? Emma you can do magic.” Regina’s confidence in her abilities was almost as terrifying as whatever abilities she actually had. “I know it can be frightening—“

“Do you? You were born with it.”

“And raised by a mother who used it like a hammer. I know better than anyone its dangers. And I know how it can…feel at first. Foreign.”

Foreign.

In the bathroom Regina had said it was all about emotions. Emma’s need to protect. She’d told her to work from there.

And then something bubbled up inside of Emma. Something tangible and at once a part of her and apart from her. And Regina had smiled.

It had been beautiful.

Stupid.

“Just stop trying to tell me this works or that you can teach me. I can’t be taught.”

“You were doing just fine,” Aurora said from the bathroom.

“I wasn’t **doing** anything.”

Regina stepped closer—cautiously. “You were creating magic. Not much. But the goal was just to conjure it. Not to use it. And really that’s all you’ll have to do. Conjure a little magic. Hide it from Bluebeard.”

“If it was that easy why couldn’t you do it?”

“Magic is about emotion. What I conjure comes from anger. What you conjure comes from…”

A word Regina wouldn’t bring herself to say.

“Your magic is different.”

“Better,” Mary Margaret said confidently.

Regina didn’t wince, because Regina tended not to show it when something hurt, but something flared in her eyes briefly.

“How am I supposed to hide from Bluebeard’s magic? Like you don’t think this is all sounding a bit too…” She flounced her hands around.

Regina caught them. Squeezed tightly. “If you can see the magic you can hide from it.”

“What like the golems?”

“No,” Regina said solemnly. She glanced at Mary Margaret before coming closer to Emma. With her hands still in Regina’s grip it felt a little too intimate. “You have to understand that magic isn’t just about power or emotion. They’re critical, but to truly use magic is to defy instinct. Because instinct tells us to look away.”

To run away.

Regina placed her hand over the locket. Her fingertips brushed against the skin of Emma’s chest. For once her touch was not cool. “But we cannot look away. That is what separates us from them Emma.” Her voice was so low. Soft. “We dare to see. Just there on the fringes of this world. That is where magic lies. And we’re portals to it. We draw it to us. Through us. But first we gaze into its abyss and we show no fear.”

It was like Regina was hypnotizing her. Her words lulling Emma into a place. A space where she could do it.

Where she could see. 

“Now look. Look where you have purposely chosen not to,” Regina urged.

“Where—“

“You know where.”

At the nausea that accompanied Bluebeard’s magic. The dark awfulness. The terror that snuck into Emma. 

“Can you see it?”

Emma could **feel** it.

Waves that brought her to her knees. Mary Margaret cried out but Regina held Emma. Let her sag against her. She was familiar. Warm.

She smelled of apples.

And Bluebeard’s magic—the source of it—was death. Rotting corpses. Lives claimed in pain and terror.

Women. So many women. 

Sacrificed so he could be a god in a little castle.

“That is what you must hide us from.”

She found her footing again, even as her insides seemed to quail being so close to such evil.

Her eyes found the hand still pressed to her chest. Saw the bare arm it was attached to. Followed it to where it disappeared beneath a blanket.

What did Regina’s magic look like?

What was the source of her power?

“Don’t.”

Like she read Emma’s mind. 

“Why not?”

“I need to see my son.”

Emma had to squeeze the hand on her chest, because she couldn’t say she understood. She didn’t think she really did.

But she couldn’t look either, because Regina, who claimed Bluebeard used the darkest sort of magic possible, was positive her own magic was just as evil.

And they both knew that if Emma saw that. If she confirmed the suspicions at the edge of her thoughts.

She’d abandon Regina to this fairytale land in a heartbeat.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot happens in this chapter. Revelations. Catharsis. But mainly Aurora becomes my favorite. Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. I’ve grown totally in love with her—or at least the version of her I’m developing.
> 
> Thank you for chancing this ride, and as always feedback is loved, appreciated and the best motivator a fic writer can have!

There they were, in the dead of night, just the three of them. A sleeping princess and two wary queens.

Hook had returned to the festivities below so as to “not draw attention” though Regina suspected he was going to seek out Sinbad again. One last clasp before Hook hopefully found his way to another world and the revenge he sought.

Mulan and Aurora left too, one yawning and the other supporting her as they stumbled from the room in search of a few hours rest.

It was just Snow and Emma and herself then. The fire had burned down to embers that glowed orange against the blue black shadows. Emma had fallen face first onto the bed and was snoring softly. Her first real sleep since Regina and she had started on this journey together.

Snow didn’t sleep.

Regina didn’t either. They sat by the fire, their backs to the embers so each could better watch the sleeping woman and the awake one next to them.

Snow was the first to speak. As always, trying to bridge those gaps she’d helped forge herself and wearing that graciousness that she and Regina both knew was nothing more than a costume.

“You and Emma seem to be getting along,” she said conversationally.

And Regina’s fingers twitched with the memory of Emma’s skin. Smooth and warm and flawless beneath her fingers. Skin she had no right to touch and should have had no desire for.

“A partnership of necessity.”

“For her. Not for you though.”

Little Snow White, so observant when she truly wished it. But Regina saw just as much.

“Have you noticed how she cringes every time you’re called her mother? It would seem she still hasn’t forgiven you.”

“For what you did.”

“I cast the curse. **You** cast her how out Snow.”

“To protect her.”

“No. You put her in that wardrobe to break the curse and save yourself.”

“And every other person you cursed,” she whispered harshly, the words grating in her throat.

“And in the process you condemned her my dear. Set her adrift in a world where orphans aren’t plucky heroines but statistics. It’s all right. I don’t blame you. It makes you so painfully…human. Knocks you from that little ivory tower you hoisted yourself up upon.”

“What would you have done Regina? If it had been Cora casting the curse and **your** child destined to break it? You would have done the **exact** same thing.”

No, Regina would have escaped. She and her daughter both. She would have fought tooth and nail. Slaughtered everyone.

She would have killed Cora to protect herself and her child.

But Snow had simply condemned her. Left her alive in her onyx tower with a father who loved her and could not protect her and servants and slaves who adored and feared her.

Why?

She never dared ask the question.

Because the answer was worse than death itself.

Why did Snow White let Regina live when death could have saved so many?

“And if I had done the same thing dear? That would make **us** the same.”

“That would make us both mothers Regina. Something I like to think, that with time, even you could be.” 

Snow’s lips twitched. Almost into a smile.

“You should sleep,” a change of subject. A blatant shift from a conversation Regina lost all taste for. “If all goes as planned tomorrow will be a **very** busy day.”

“As long as you’re awake than I’m awake,” Snow challenged.

“Then I suppose you should get quite comfortable.”

 

####

Emma woke up when it was still dark to find Mary Margaret and Regina both wide awake. Regina stood at one of the room’s two large windows with her arms crossed and contemplation clear on her face. Mary Margaret had an arrow notched in her bow which she’d laid across her lap, ready for someone to pop in, or, more likely, for Regina to start shouting and shooting fireballs—which she couldn’t even do currently. 

“Did you two **seriously** stay up all night?”

Both women refused to respond. Like **Emma** was the crazy one to get some rest and they weren’t for staying up so they could glare distrustfully at each other.

“Because I slept great. Could run a 5k and everything.”

“Good,” Regina said, “you might have to.”

“Why?” Did Emma sound whiny and petulant? She had to have. Her voice reached octaves usually found only by little girls in choirs. It was a reflex whenever someone said stuff like Regina just had.

“Something’s out there.” 

She shared a nervous glance with Mary Margaret and they both ran to crowd around the window not occupied by a moderately evil queen. In the gray light before dawn the castle and the town beyond were perfectly still.

“I don’t see anything.”

Regina grimaced, “It’s there.”

Mary Margaret squinted then gasped. “Oh God.”

“What?”

“There are hundreds.”

“What?”

“Centaurs.” Mary Margaret pointed out towards the tree line a good half mile from the town. 

The same tree line Emma had stood in with Regina what seemed a lifetime ago. And if she looked, tilted her head just so she could see—“I still don’t see anything.”

Mary Margaret grabbed her chin and tilted it until Emma’s head was nearly sideways. Then she stuck her hand out—pointing again. “In the trees.”

“That’s like forever away.”

The queen smirked, “Perhaps you need glasses?”

She shot Regina the finger. “I can see just fine. Are you two sure?”

“Very,” they said in unison. Then they both grimaced.

“Okay…why are the centaurs out there?”

“For the same reason they kidnapped you and chased us. They want you dead.”

“What? Because I’m the savior?”

Mary Margaret carefully stepped between Regina and Emma, pushing Emma back with her shoulder and notching an arrow. “Or, because whomever freed them asked.”

Regina smiled, “You think I asked them to kill her? When I promised Henry I would get you both back alive?”

“No, I think Cora did.”

“Then why are you drawing an arrow like **I’m** the villain?”

Emma shoved past Mary Margaret, “Because you’re both idiots. We’ve got centaurs, Bluebeard and probably Cora breathing down our necks. I don’t need you two fighting too.”

“Emma, Regina’s—“

“ **I** wasn’t the one with a bow—“

“Enough,” she shouted, “seriously. I get you two hate each other so much there are about a billion shitty movies back in our world about it. But now’s not the time. So put aside the centuries old—“

“Decades,” they both interrupted.

“—Feud and start thinking about surviving the next few hours. Okay?”

“Fine,” Mary Margaret said almost immediately.

Regina took longer, because she liked to be difficult. “Regina?”

“Yes, all right. I will hold my tongue.”

“And?”

She rolled her eyes, “And I won’t toss your mother off a wall when everyone’s back is turned.”

“Thank you.” One fire settled Emma looked back out the window to find many more.

Shit.

One. Two. Three.

Dozens.

Hundreds.

Torches were being lit. Setting the forest ablaze with light. The centaurs were mobilizing. In the shanty town and the castle below pirates scrambled.

“Damn it,” she groaned out loud. They couldn’t have waited, like, an hour? Just so she was fully awake and they had Mulan and Aurora there to make plans? Would it have really been **that** bad?

“Snow, I suggest you retrieve your two friends quickly. We’ll need to move very soon.”

She glanced at Mary Margaret skeptically, “Uh, why aren’t we going with her?”

Regina tilted her head, “Because Emma, I have to teach you how to defend us with magic and I have precious little time to do it.”

“You…what?”

“My daughter will **not** just be your magic—your magic **gun** Regina!”

Yeah! 

And also, again, WHAT?

Regina sighed again, “We don’t have time to argue this. Bluebeard **will** seek us out when those centaurs attack. He **will** be angry. And she **is** our only defense.”

Damn it. “Mary Margaret she’s right.”

“I’m not leaving you alone with her,” she said under her breath. Regina rolled her eyes, clearly having heard it.

She clasped her friend’s—mother’s—person’s hands. “We don’t really have a choice do we? Get Mulan and Aurora. I’ll be okay.”

Mary Margaret looked past her to give Regina one more death glare before suddenly pulling Emma into a huge hug and then darting away.

A little embarrassed in what she suspected was the same way a teenager was embarrassed by their parents Emma hooked her thumbs into her pant’s waists and turned back to give Regina an apologetic smile. “Moms huh?”

“I wouldn’t know. Mine spent my life trying to kill me or those I hold dear.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“That doesn’t matter now. You being able to protect us from Bluebeard is what matters.”

“So fireballs? Finally gonna learn that trick? Or just how to like, summon crap to fight for me?”

“Neither.”

Emma pouted.

“That would take years judging by your talent. I’m just going to teach you how to survive.”

 

####

The worst part was when the door smashed open and a dark shape rushed in Regina almost…stepped **in front** of Emma. It was counter to everything Regina was. And it rattled her more than the way Emma actually did stand in front of her protectively and hold up a single hand threateningly. 

Magic was in that hand. Incandescent and pulsating softly. Almost invisible but for the sheer **power** Emma drew up. Regina had taught her well. The girl—woman—was a quick study. Learning more in fifteen minutes than some hopefuls would learn in years. 

“Trust in the locket,” she’d said. Because the locket was laced with her own magic. It gave Emma a blueprint. Paths to follow. Protection. Attack. The most basic functions were hers to wield if she just trusted in it.

And the woman Regina knew to be quite thorny was paradoxical. Trusting so easily.

The shape stumbled into the light and both women relaxed.

“Hook,” Emma said in irritation.

He cocked his thumb back in the direction of the door, “Did you know a whole army of centaurs are raiding this place?”

“We gathered,” Regina said frostily.

“And you two are up here just canoodling?”

“I was giving the good Miss Swan a lesson in magic. As soon as Snow and her little friends have returned we’re—“

“Making a play for Dorothy’s dumb shoes and getting the hell out of here.”

“And no one was going to tell me?”

She shared a look with Emma, completely on the same page. They both shrugged. “Nope, not really,” Emma said.

“We assumed you’d just figure it out on your own.”

“You know what they say about assuming don’t you love?”

“Ass. You. Me. Real clever pal. You’re here now.”

“And Snow is not,” Regina noted.

“Maybe they got held up?”

“Or they’re dead. We should get moving.”

“Not without Mary Margaret.”

This blasted woman—“Emma I’m truly sorry, but we have to move. If this idiot’s found us more dangerous ones will as well.”

“Technically I didn’t **find** you. I came to warn you and—“

“Seriously,” Emma exclaimed.

Regina agreed. The man could be so damned argumentative…why was she looking at Regina? “You mean me?”

“I spend twenty-eight years looking for my mom and you want me to leave her because she’s not even late?”

That did sound rather nasty.

“To be fair, centaurs have breeched the castle walls. It’s a bloody blood bath in the great hall.”

“You’re both evil sons of bitches if you think I’m leaving Mary Margaret—“

“Here,” the woman herself shouted, breathlessly falling into the room all rosy cheeked and scattered looking. It reminded Regina of when Snow was a girl, forever running in the forest outside the castle walls and daring Regina to give chase on Rocinante.

“I’m the fastest runner in the kingdom,” the girl had claimed. No one, even Regina, had bothered to correct her. It had always been much simpler to smile and then outpace her and disappear into the darkest corners of the forest where the birds rarely sang and only the breeze in the leaves kept her company.

“You took your time,” she snapped, “did you stop to warn the **entire** castle on your way?”

“I was gone all of five minutes,” she snapped back.

“And she’s here now,” Emma reminded her.

“Yes we’re all here,” Hook remarked, “it’s wonderful. Especially how these two are still all flushed from **sleeping** ,” he motioned at Mulan and the Aurora, who both flushed suspiciously.

Snow rolled her eyes, “Not everyone is gay.”

“When we’re not in mortal danger I look forward to introducing you to the Killian Jones scale. Proof that everyone is a little bit gay.”

“Says the walking hypersexualized gay man stereotype,” muttered Aurora to every single other person in the room’s surprise.

Emma opened her mouth. Shut it. “Okay…can we go now?”

“No, you cannot.” 

A thick hand wrapped around Regina’s throat and pulled her back into a hard and unyielding body.

Time slowed.

Emma swung around. Snow drew an arrow. Mulan a sword. Captain Jones backed away in horror. Aurora could only stare.

Regina.

Froze.

Bluebeard had somehow come through the window and now held her to him by the throat. He hunched over her. Dominated her with little more than physical presence.

Had she magic…

Had she magic he would burn. Everything would burn. 

“I’ve no need of your friends,” he boomed in her ear. Then he flicked the wrist of his free hand and the five people across from her all flew back, smacking into stone walls or fragile wood furniture that shattered in an instance.

He flung Regina away to. Sending her to her knees once more. She caught herself on her hands. The stone scraped against her palms.

“You abandon me to this land and then you bring the centaurs to **my** home? How foolish are you child?”

She did not crawl. She would not crawl. She looked up, flicking her hair out of her eyes with a quick jerk of her head, and then looked him in the eye. “I didn’t do this.”

He sneered.

She found a way to stand. Her joints groaned and muscles ached. But she stood. “ **You** did this,” she continued. “ **You** brought them down on your head.”

That awful hand lashed out. Sending Regina into the air where his magic swirled around her. Bound her.

Oh how he would burn if she had magic.

“You will suffer.” A threat. A weak one as his voice cracked. “You will—“

She laughed, “Then get on with it. I tire of your theatrics.”

“Yeah, me too.”

A gale-storm of magic suddenly cut a swath across the room, shredding stone and kicking up dust. Blowing out the window Bluebeard had entered through and sending him flying out into the early morning light. It careened into Regina’s back, sending her skittering forward too. Out towards the light. Over the edge. She reached out. Scrambled for purchased. Her arm struck something hard and her hand brushed against something solid and she grasped. Held on as tightly as she could. There was nothing below her feet and cold winds buffeted her body.

She was outside of the build. Blown clear outside and clinging to the edge of the tower they’d been in.

Emma’s head, dirty and dusty, peered over the edge and actual relief brightened her visage. “Oh thank God. I thought I shot you out of the room too.”

“You did,” she shouted up at her. “I’m on the outside of the building!”

“But you’re alive,” she protested.

Regina thrust her hand out, “Help me up.”

“A thank you would be nice.”

“Getting flung out of a tower by magic does **not** warrant a thanks!”

Emma rolled her eyes but reached down, taking Regina’s hand in her own calloused one and pulling her up with a grunt.

“Geeze, what the hell do you eat?”

“If you put your back **and** magic into it I would—“ Emma screwed her face up like she was actually struggling pulling Regina back into the room. “I’m not that heavy!”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re a lightweight—“ She stopped. Staring off in horror. “Shit.” She followed Emma’s wide eyes which necessitated looking over her shoulder and down into the courtyard far below, where Bluebeard was ripping centaurs and golems apart with his bare hands. “That’t can’t be good.”

Regina scrambled for purchased with her feet. “No. Decidedly not. Hurry?”

“I’m hurrying you high…ness!” With one more mighty Emma pulled her back into the room, collapsing back onto the floor and bringing Regina down on top of her with an “oomph.”

“That’s terribly romantic,” Hook remarked from somewhere far away from bright green eyes and flushed cheeks and wet lips.

“Shut up,” they both retorted.

And they didn’t break eye contact when they said it. They were in perfect resonance. As though the locket between them was becoming a tuning fork. Tilting each woman until they were more alike than either had ever fathomed.

Emma smiled nervously. Delicately. Her eyes wandered over Regina’s whole face and her hand actually rose to push the hair out of Regina’s eyes. But it stopped just short.

Regina couldn’t fathom the look on her own face. Nor could she quite process all the emotions inside of her that were unrelated to wrath and vindication. She just knew her mouth was open and little puffs of air were coming out and the body beneath her was yielding in a way no other’s had.

Snow groaned. The spell being forged crumbled. Turning to nothing with only that noise. Regina disentangled herself quite violently. Jerking back as though burned and scampering out of Emma’s reach. Hook helped her to her feet without a quip and Mulan offered Emma her own hand.

Aurora was crouched in the corner beside Snow, who had a blossom of red ichor streaking down her face.

“Oh my god, Mary Margaret!” Emma fell in her haste to get to her mother, but picked herself up and dashed the last few steps.  “Jesus. Are you okay?”

Snow nodded. “Y—yes. I’m fine.”

“Your head?”

“I’m okay, Emma.” Snow was so natural with her daughter. Exuding comfort even as blood flowed from her hairline. Her touch soothed Emma and her words were confident. How could maternity come so easily to her? How did she possess such a gift while Regina, who had never sacrificed her child on the alter of fate, had a son who rejected her at every turn?

Why? Why was Snow always blessed and Regina cursed?

“Ladies, perhaps we should dispense with all this concern and tender looks until after we’ve escaped?”

“Hook’s right,” God help her she was agreeing with **Killian Jones**. 

If Emma had intended on protesting she did not. If she’d intended on agreeing she could not. Because the scent of death wafted through the room and horror spread across Emma’s face and Regina realized she was dodging some deadly fist even as the other woman was shouting for her to move.

She fell forward and spun around her mind calling for magic she was still denied.

Time had run out.

Bluebeard had returned. Now covered in gore. His beard soaked to a dark burgundy. His anger before was nothing compared to what now contorted his features and as angered as Regina was by her lack of magic she was grateful too, because had she been able to see the power radiating off of him she would have found herself, again, on her knees.

But Emma was not. She walked confidently past Regina. Her head held high. That face, the face of justice born. Righteousness that had no place in their world. 

“Get the shoes. I’ll deal with the trash,” she said. Like a hero. Like the women and men who were Regina’s enemies at every turn. A hero. Stepping between Regina and destruction.

She fled the room. Fled Bluebeard. But too large a part of her was fleeing Emma.

Because Emma was **the** Savior, and Regina was terrified that she was Regina’s savior too.

 

####

Regina, being Regina, didn’t hesitate. Emma told her to go and she was all too happy to clear the room. Hook ran after her. But nope. Not Mulan and Aurora, and not Mary Margaret.

“Go,” she growled, “now.”

Mary Margaret had blood on her face and was scratched up all to hell from being tossed across the room like a rag doll along with the rest of them, but she didn’t blink. Just notched an arrow, “I’m not leaving you.”

Behind her Mulan and Aurora shared a look. Something akin to “maybe we shouldn’t leave the two untrustworthy bad guys all alone to recover the path back home” and they both left.

Which left her with her **mother** and Bluebeard, grinning like a mad man, pacing like a panther and **waiting**.

“Now I understand why Regina keeps you around girl. You’ve talent.”

“Please, Duke,” Mary Margaret urged. One last attempt at peace.

He held up his hand to do more of that control stuff. Only Emma actually remembered the junk Regina had been crash coursing her in.

She could see the magic and when she saw it it was easy enough to just, like, stop it. 

Bluebeard scowled. “What are you?” It wasn’t curiosity driving the question though. More like irritation.

“None of your business asshole.” She let loose another torrent of magic. It scattered rubble and blew her hair back and even Mary Margaret had to hold an arm up to shield herself.

When the dust settled Bluebeard just stood there, his fists on his hips and his chest sticking out like a god damned superhero.

“You come into my domain and think brunt force will win the day girl?”

“Please,” Mary Margaret urged again.

“Yeah,” Emma said, “I kind of do.”

He tilted his head from one side to the other, the crack audible from across the room. “Then allow me to educate you.”

And then things got violent.

 

####

Oh for heaven’s sake.

Regina desperately wanted to keep running. She was sore in ways she hadn’t been sore since she was a teenager and the absolute truth was she wanted nothing more than a bed, but running was still preferable to having to stop so a huffing and puffing Hook and Snow’s allies could catch up.

She stopped anyways, rounding on them and looking past them. “Anyone else coming or is this the end of the merry parade?”

“Snow and Emma have engaged the Duke,” Mulan said officiously.

“And no one trusted you and Hook enough to let you run off by yourself,” Aurora followed up.

“I’m offended,” Hook said.

“And I’ve no time for this. Keep pace,” she said to all three.

But she couldn’t bring herself to return to the jog she’d been maintaining before. Something about the four of them trotting down a corridor in sync was just too ridiculous. So they walked quickly.

Which was actually better. The halls and rooms were all alive with screams and shouts as the battle raged. Things exploded because some idiot had discovered the cannons and were making liberal use of them and other things screeched as the hooves of centaurs ground pirates into pulp.

“They’re being slaughtered,” Aurora said darkly.

“But who is the important question,” Hook countered. “The men who swore allegiance to Bluebeard were far from innocent.”

“Even your Sinbad?”

“You remember my friend your majesty. How curious.” The teasing bastard.

She defended herself. “He’s famous in the world we’re trying to get back to.”

“Really? He’ll be delighted to know.”

“You are too.”

“I’m notorious am I?”

“You’re despised and something of a joke.”

Aurora snorted. Even Mulan cracked a smile.

Hook huffed and walked ahead of them.

But Aurora quickly took his place, “This other world. Is everyone from our land known there?”

“Yes, but our stories are…different.”

“How so,” asked Mulan, apparently curious too.

She wracked her brain for differences these two would understand. She knew nothing of Mulan and had only heard of her in the scantest of passings back in Storybrooke. And she wasn’t about to tell them the various interpretations of her own history, or her mother’s or Snow’s.

Ah.

“You’re the girl Maleficent cursed?”

Aurora nodded.

“In the other world you have a father.”

She looked offended, “I do?”

“Yes. He’s rather important to your story.”

“What of my mothers?”

“Walk on parts. Barely discussed.”

The exact opposite of the actual women. One was a fallen fairy and Maleficent’s mortal enemy. The other the only heir to a kingdom. They’d waged their war against Maleficent and fallen in love. When their daughter, a product of that love and an ample helping of fairy dust, was born Maleficent had done what she did best. Made a dramatic entrance and cursed the little snit.

Had Maleficent been a person and not a dragon trapped in a cave underground for twenty-eight years she would have been immensely amused by the gross perversion of their tale.

“My mothers would be horrified.”

“I’m sure they are.” 

Thought not as horrified as they’d been when the curse broke. One was a nun and the other worked in the cannery. 

“You’ve seen them?”

“But Aurora’s land was untouched by the curse.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps her dear mothers weren’t **in** her land.”

“It **was** infested with ogres and briars,” Hook observed. “Hardly hospitable.”

“My parents are alive,” Aurora said to herself.

Mulan squeezed the girl’s shoulder in comfort. “You’ll be able to see them again.”

They both smiled at each other.

Even Hook seemed a little touched by the idea of the reunion.

A pity then. For all of them.

The magic in the slippers was ample, but it would hardly be enough to take the entire rapidly growing group through. She’d been unsure she’d even be able to get herself and Emma and Snow through. It was why she’d insisted on going alone in the first place.

Which meant, when the moment came, someone would have to be left behind.

She just had to make sure it wasn’t her. 

Or Emma.

 

####

Emma ducked, waving her hand wildly which sent the bigger half of the bed she’d slept on careening into Bluebeard. Mary Margaret let loose another arrow at the same moment, and this one struck him in the thigh.

The bastard was turning in a pin cushion, with at least five other arrows sticking out of him, but that didn’t bother him. He just snapped off the feathered ends and came at them with even more magic.

And like before Mary Margaret cried out.

In concern.

For Emma.

Bluebeard laughed. 

“Our queen.” He waved at Mary Margaret. “A traitor to her father and her kingdom. Driven to actually **caring** for you little harlots. A **victim** of that thing between her legs.”

“Really,” Emma snarled, “you should shut up about my mom.”

She launched another volley at him and he deflected it causally, still laughing. “This is what you shat out Snow? A wretch who befriends your worst enemy and assaults your most loyal subject?”

“You’re insane,” Mary Margaret responded in awe. “Regina was right about everything wasn’t she? About what you are?”

“What’s that?” God his grin was like looking into madness made tangible.

Emma carefully put herself between Bluebeard and Mary Margaret. “You tried to marry your daughter.”

“She is the only beauty to rival that of her mother.”

“She’s your **daughter** ,” Mary Margaret shouted over Emma’s shoulder. 

“You know, cursing her to our land? Probably the nicest thing Regina’s ever done.”

“She’s happy there,” Mary Margaret said. “Regina did give her that.”

“And for that crime I’ll peel the skin from her flesh and force her to eat it.”

“Yeah,” Emma popped her knuckles. “I think I’m pretty much officially done engaging with you.” She cast another wave of magic. Or she would have. But her whole body locked up.

“I’ll have you watch. Maybe even give you a taste.” The nausea of his magic—what she’d been able to see and work around was suddenly invading her again. Bile seemed to boil in her stomach. “You’ll learn why your weak sex trembles in my presence.”

The blood he wore had mingled with his own from the arrow wounds.

Damn it. That wasn’t good.

She staggered. Mary Margaret caught her. Distantly asked what was happening.

“You can feel it now can’t you girl? What I am?”

Emma could see it now. The alchemy of life and death he’d mastered. The blood he wore. She thought it was just the centaurs. The golems. But it was human blood in his beard—mixing with his own and giving him such power.

“Your sex is weak. Prone to emotion. Prone to selflessness. It makes you particularly sweet sacrifices.”

For his magic.

Emma tried to move. The muscles in her arms screamed with effort. Mary Margaret stepped back.

Bluebeard came closer.

“How will your blood taste in my veins?”

He grabbed Emma’s chin. Tilted her face up so that she could stare into those eyes.

But she wasn’t scared.

A mad man looming over her. That was as familiar to her as the band of thieves and degenerates in the great hall. Bluebeard, for all his magic, for his palace and golems and pirate army, he was just a man.

Just an evil man as malicious as any she’d known.

“Give me a lick,” she said through gritted teeth, “find out.

“How about,” Mary Margaret said from some where to their left, “no.”

Steel flashed in the light of the rising sun before cleaving through all that sinew as Mary Margaret buried her sword in Bluebeard’s thick neck.

He gurgled and went limp.

Snow offered her a hand up. 

“No one,” she said menacingly, “messes with my daughter.”

 

####

Naturally the castle was being overrun by centaurs and a chaotic battleground and Bluebeard still managed to send a whole swath of golems to guard the tower with the shoes.

“He doesn’t want to make this easy for us does he,” Mulan asked.

“No, I expect not.”

“If you’d ladies like I can stay back here and offer moral support.”

“I would be happy to join you,” Aurora agreed.

Mulan sighed loud enough to express displeasure but not loud enough to earn the attention of the golems ahead. She pulled her bow off her shoulder and handed it and a quiver of arrows to Aurora. “You know how to shoot yes?”

“All well bred princesses know how to shoot a bow,” she said haughtily.

“Even ones in a kingdom that outlaws needles,” Regina challenged.

Mulan ignored her and continued, “Aurora you will stay back and use the bow.” She pulled a vial out of the satchel on her waist. “Coat the tips of the arrows in this. It disrupts magic. Hopefully it will work against the golems. Hook and I will use our swords and finish off rest. Regina—“

“Retrieve the shoes?”

“And don’t betray us.”

Hook drew his sword and examined the edge of the blade, “I feel like I’m getting a bit of the raw end of this deal. Why can’t I stay back and shoot?”

“Because that hook will make it pretty difficult for you to shoot fast won’t it? You’re part of a team now,” Mulan lectured, “ **both** of you are. This only works if we all work together.”

Regina covered a yawn with her hand, “Yes I suppose.”

Aurora, hopped up on the idea of a great and heroic team stuck her hand out. Mulan immediately covered it with her own. They shared a **very** friendly smile and then they both looked at her and Hook.

He raised an eyebrow. Regina did the same.

“All for one,” Mulan warned.

Good god. Was this…actually happening? 

She resisted a groan and put her hand over theirs. “And one for all Monsieur Dumas.”

Hook sighed, “I despise the whole lot of you.” But that didn’t stop him from placing his hand in the pile. “Should I die I would like to inform you that I will hunt down each and every one of you in my ghost ship and haunt you till the end of your days.”

“I had no idea you held such affection for us,” Regina retorted. She stood and eyed the golems again. Mulan drew her sword. Aurora, suddenly not quite as whispy and princess-like, methodically drew six arrows, dipped each in the vial and leaned them against the wall. She drew a seventh, prepared it and placed it on the bow.

“Everyone stay alive,” Mulan said. She didn’t wait for agreement. With a flashy twirl of her sword she shouted and rushed headlong into the golems.

Hook muttered something about bloody idiot heroes and joined her in the fray.

Regina took a deep breath and then darted out, ducking under golems and narrowly avoiding the fists they used like maces. She didn’t slow down approaching the door. Bluebeard would have reactivated the spells protecting it. Without magic her only hope was to run so fast that she could sort of tear through them. It would be painful. It would be unpleasant.

It was the only chance she had. 

She twisted so she led with her shoulder like one of those ridiculous football players. She tucked her head down. As soon as her shoulder met the door she reached for the knob, twisting it and charging forward while bracing for the agony of breaking through a magic barrier.

But no pain came.

The barrier was gone.

She quickly stood up straight and patted her clothes down as if she’d see some little fragment of the spells clinging to the fabric.

Nothing.

Bluebeard hadn’t had time to reapply his protective spells apparently. It was odd—but she didn’t have time to ponder it. She needed the shoes.

And there they were. Returned to their pedestal and now glistening in the light of the sun that had risen over the horizon. And with them, perched in between and delicately placed on a sumptuous velvet pillow, was the peach she’d stolen.

It would have been perfect, but for the single bite taken from its juicy flesh.

“Yes, it would seem the Duke has sampled your precious fruit and given himself a taste of immortality.”

Regina froze.

“I considered sampling it myself, but I would prefer we share it Regina.”

No.

“The we can be together. For eternity.”

God. No.

She turned which should have been impossible because the blood in her had turned to ice. She was so cold with dread her teeth should have chattered.

And **she** stepped out of the shadows. Smiling that awful smile that Regina would forever classify as maternal because she knew no better.

“Hello Regina,” she said.

“Hello…Mother.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friendly reminder, especially when concerning this part, that all opinions are those of the characters.

Her mother held her hands out plaintively. “I’m so sorry dear. For everything. I know why you felt you had to get rid of me and I understand—“

She circled her warily, keeping the pedestal between them. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to rescue you. Why else would I be in this…” she looked around distastefully, “place?”

“And the centaurs?”

“I freed them, so they do as I ask.”

“Including abduct Emma Swan.”

“Yes, including abduct Snow White’s daughter.”

“Why? What could that possibly accomplish?”

“She told me you had a son—”

Henry.

“—That you…share with her?” Only Cora could be offended by the idea of sharing. Offended and amused. “What possessed you to **share** your child with Snow White’s daughter?”

“She’s the birth mother.” The revelation slipped off her tongue before she could think better of it.

“So she shares him with you.”

“No.” 

She had to be careful. Her mother had this…gift for slipping into Regina’s head. And not just with magic. No, Cora was more insidious. It was almost physical the way she grasped hold of Regina’s mind.

“ **I** share him with **her**.”

“You’re lying.”

She was.

Once upon a time Henry **had** been hers. But Emma had come and her son had viewed her like a shiny new toy, eager to play. Regina had left it. Let her son have his shiny toy because she and Emma both knew she’d leave eventually. She hadn’t been ready for a child when she’d had him and ten years would not change that.

Only Emma had stayed. Besides Henry himself Emma had been the only person she’d ever met to surprise her so easily and so often. She’d stayed and fought and changed for their son, and Henry had rejected Regina.

Left her just so he could sleep in a ratty apartment that smelled like the birth mother that had abandoned him.

“I can help you get him back.”

Her eyes snapped back to her mother.

“I haven’t lost him.”

“Really? Between you and Snow White’s family he chooses you?”

No.

“We share,” she insisted.

“But he isn’t **yours**.”

No. No, he wasn’t.

 

####

Mary Margaret tried to help Emma up but stumbled at the last moment, forcing Emma to keep them both steady.

“You okay,” they asked each other at the same time.

And then, “I’m fine” came out of both of them too.

And it was totally true for Emma. But between the bad attempt at staying steady and the blood from the cut on her scalp Emma was pretty sure Mary Margaret was **not** okay. “I think you got hit harder than we thought.” 

“No, Emma…”

“You can barely stand up straight. Come on. We’ll get out of here and, I don’t know, magic you some tylenol or something.” She slung Mary Margaret’s arm over her shoulder and wrapped her hand around her waist, supporting her a lot easier than she’d thought.

What was it Regina had said? Lift with the magic? She tried funneling the **whatever** in her through the locket and sure enough supporting Mary Margaret became a lot easier.

With her good hand she yanked the sword out of Bluebeard’s neck. He gurgled and more blood leaked out of the wound like a sieve but he stayed down.

“Did that kill him?”

Mary Margaret shivered, “Let’s hope so. I swung as hard as I could. Usually that’d decapitate someone.”

“Charming.”

She brightened, “Yeah, your father’s very good at decapitation.”

Gross.

And disturbing.

Emma shuddered. “More things added to the ‘visuals I never needed’ pile.”

At that point she **knew** everything was not okay because instead of defending David like Mary Margaret basically did ninety percent of the time she just nodded weakly.

Emma jammed the sword through her belt and swung Mary Margaret up into her arms and ran.

And Mary Margaret didn’t protest.

 

####

She took another step back. Away from the shoes. Away from the peach. Away from **her**.

“You can get him back? How?”

“By leaving those two fools to the centaurs.” She held out a gloved hand. “Come dear. We’ll return to this other world, take Henry and finally be a family.”

“I can’t come back without them. Henry—“

“Will understand. We’ll **make** him understand.”

Like all the times she’d made Regina understand. With stern words and vicious magic and a dead lover chilling at her feet. 

“It’s not that easy Mother we can’t just magic this away.”

Her mother tilted her head. Studied Regina like she was one of her magic books. Sighed. “Very well. We’ll figure out some other way. Show him how evil they are. Show them how **awful** Snow White is.”

A week ago…a week ago Regina would have jumped at the chance. Now, “I can’t do that to Emma. I owe her a debt and—“

“Enough.”

The protest caught in Regina’s throat.

Her mother rounded the pillar. “These people spent their entire lives putting all of us under their heel. You don’t **owe** them anything Regina.”

“No.” A voice she thought had been lost welled up inside of her, “No, Mother, **you** were the one grinding me under your boot. They’re not family, but Emma Swan has done more for me in the last **week** than—“

And suddenly she was right there. Directly in front of Regina. So close she could see the pale hairs on her chin and the wrinkles around her eyes that hadn’t been there a life time ago. “Than **whom** ,” she asked, her voice low. Deadly serious. “Than the mother that bore you? That sacrificed everything to raise you up? I **love** you Regina. Emma Swan does not.”

 

####

Emma could honestly say she never would have thought of Sleeping Beauty, Captain Hook, the Evil Queen and Mulan as an effective team, but there were at least three of them casually finishing off golems with swords and arrows and completely unmussed and the fourth gone through the open door to the eerily still tower. She carefully leaned Mary Margaret against the wall and took a moment to just appreciate the sheer carnage.

“Glad I wasn’t late.”

Hook plucked at his gore soaked clothes, “My shirts ruined. I’ll be sending you and her Majesty the bill.”

“Put it on our tab.” She nodded towards the tower, “She got in okay?”

Mulan put her foot on the chest of a golem to get better leverage as she drew the sword out of its head. The whole thing made a disgusting sucking sound. She flicked the blade away from them and gore rained down on the stone. “She’s been in there since the battle began.”

“Is she hiding,” Aurora asked.

Hook shrugged, “Evil witch without magic stuck in a life or death battle? Makes sense.”

“I’ll go get her. You guys maybe want to get Mary Margaret out of here?”

“I’m fine, really. I just…” Mary Margaret drifted off again.

Aurora started, “Oh my go—“

Mulan rushed across the stone, “What happened?”

Hook covered a yawn with his hook because he was an asshole.

Emma rubbed the back of her neck, still aching from all the getting tossed around and heavy lifting. “I think she knocked her head worse than we thought earlier. I need you guys to, I don’t know. Get her out of here?”

“We left the horses outside the city. But with the battle it will be difficult to get to them.”

Hook sighed loudly.

Aurora scowled, “If you don’t intend to help I suggest you keep your extremely loud breathing to yourself Captain.”

“Look, I suppose we can take her to my ship. Meet you and her Majesty further down the shore line. Away from the sheer carnage being unleashed on what was a perfectly pleasant hovel until recently.”

Emma was too busy staring in stunned silence to see if Mulan and Aurora and a dazed Mary Margaret were doing the same.

“You’re willing to help?”

He acted appalled, “I’m not a monster you know. Besides. I need you all alive to get to the other world don’t I?”

Yeah—“Yeah you do. Definitely. You need us.”

“It’s settled.” He slapped Mulan loudly on the shoulder, “Well come on warrior woman. Give her a heave and we’ll head off. The princess here and I will keep you safe. Won’t we love?”

Aurora glared but still tugged a big quiver of arrows over her shoulder. She inspected her bow all expert like. “I’d prefer if you didn’t call me ‘love,’ **love**.”

The two of them made their way down the stairs, Hook coming up with names and Aurora fingering the fletching of an arrow a little too murderously for comfort.

“Princess then? Dear? I know…Beauty!”

Emma redirected her attention to Mulan, “You’ll keep her safe?”

“On my honor Emma.”

Not really knowing what the proper protocol for seeing a warrior or whatever off Emma held out her hand. Mulan took it firmly in her own and gave it a shake. 

“We’ll sail south. Before Snow said you had a way of finding us. I assume that’s still true?”

At the reference to the locket Emma’s hand immediately rose to touch it. “Yeah. I got a way. You guys just stay safe.”

She knelt next to Mary Margaret. Her hand was limp when Emma took it. “So Mulan and them are going to take you to Hook’s ship. You’ll be safe there while I get Regina. Okay?”

“I should…go with you…”

Emma cracked a crooked smile, “I know. But you’ve got to stay busy staying awake. And alive. Mainly alive. Promise me that?”

Marg Margaret nodded once, “I promise… besides I’ve got to…tell you. All about your family. Your life.”

She felt the impulse, and rather than reject it, Emma gave in. That was sort of who she was. Everyone said it. Regina. Mary Margaret. One would scowl. The other would sigh. She was impulsive.

But that particular impulse brought her forward so she could press a gentle kiss to Mary Margaret’s forehead. It was a real maternal or daughter…aural sort of impulse and as ridiculous as it felt it also just felt fucking **right**.

Mary Margaret closed her eyes in perfect bliss and Emma felt terrified and more loved than she could ever remember feeling and it was just exactly what family was supposed to be. All the good stuff she’d heard about and the awful stuff she knew in one simple touch.

“See you in a few,” she whispered, before helping get Mary Margaret up and leaning against Mulan.

She watched them disappear down the steps and tried to ignore the tightness in her chest over the sight. That woman was her mother. Her honest to God mother. She stayed and saved Emma’s life and she loved her and she was ready to limp after Emma to keep her safe than help herself.

And Emma had never had that before.

It was maybe more unsettling than the magic and the mayhem and the adventure and the woman in the tower.

No one had thought to call out to Regina or go in after her. Maybe it was because Mulan and Aurora and Hook all felt it too. Just looking at the darkened doorway Regina had disappeared through filled Emma with dread.

Something awful lay beyond that door.

She took the deepest breath she could, sucking in salty air off the sea that smelled of ash and death from the war waged all around. Then she moved.

 

####

Her hand was still outstretched, beckoning Regina away. Offering her one of her greatest wishes: a life without Snow White or Emma Swan. One where she alone could claim Henry.

One where there wasn’t this irritating blond tugging on the threads of “goodness” within Regina and unravelling the mighty evil she’d made her core.

“We can have it all,” her mother crooned.

But what was victory if the losers were not there to suffer it? If she took Henry via murder was he really hers to possess? Or was he just her again. Another child grasped so tightly by a mother they despised. In ten years’ time would he be the one to shove **her** through a mirror? The one warily circling a pedestal to escape her touch.

“N—not this way. I want Henry to **choose** me.”

Her mother laughed. “Oh my dear,” and the amusement was replaced by hard steel in a turn, “how naive are you? Do you really think he ever **could** choose you? Or that they would let you live long enough? They have a rigid concept of good and evil. One we defy my darling. We both know what they will **always** consider you.”

“Yeah, grade-A crazy witch who loves her son.”

She hadn’t even heard Emma approach, but there she was, silhouetted in the light of the door. Heroic even as her words were pitiless. She strode across the room with purpose, her knee length coat billowing about her and her hair caught in some breeze. A hero.

And and came to stand next to Regina.

No. Just in front of her.

“You okay,” she asked.

She was. Now.

 

####

One of the first things Emma had to learn was that love wasn’t kind. It didn’t create happy endings all on its own. Love was evil as often as it was good and it made the best of people fall and raised up the worst of people.

She’d seen too many embrace those who hurt them most because of “love.” She’d watched it happen and sworn to herself over and over again that she wouldn’t be one of them.

But as often as she swore she would be different she still understood them so acutely: those who loved, and even those who loved.

Stumbling into that room and seeing Cora standing so close and whispering harsh words so sweetly and watching the war play upon Regina’s face Emma saw love.

Love she didn’t think this world she’d stumbled into understood. Mary Margaret and Henry and that stupid book all acted like love was a cure but across from her was love as a poison.

She stepped between them to draw it out. Regina’s fingers grazed Emma’s palm as she asked if she was okay.

“I’m fine.” 

Emma’s mouth turned up into a smile, her eyes never leaving Cora’s. “Sure.” Let Regina tell herself what she needed. Emma saw the truth though. She nodded at the witch opposite her, “Cora.”

Cora sighed, like Emma was a gnat or something. “Leave us.” She waved her hand dismissively and Emma felt the grasp of her magic, as cold as her daughter’s, envelope her.

But she put her faith in the locket, and in whatever it was inside of her that Regina insisted was good and the magic rolled off of her. 

“You…”

She shrugged, “Have magic apparently. Your daughter taught me a few tricks.”

“Not enough.”

Fire flared in Cora’s hand, a big ball of flame that sucked the air out of the room and burned hot on Emma’s skin.

“Mother!” 

 

####

She put herself between her mother and Emma. Shoved Emma behind her and held her hand out to block the fires she had no hope of actually stopping. Even at a distance their heat licked at Regina’s skin, turning it angry, red, and hot.

And Emma should have been a furnace behind her. Burning with her good and warm magic. But she was just living flesh against Regina’s hand. Something solid in a place of the immaterial. 

Her mother tried to circle, to get around Regina to better burn the woman behind her, but Regina kept herself between them.

She knew her mother’s magic. Rightfully feared it.

But Emma. Emma had battled a blood sorcerer in his own seat of power and survived. She was powerful in a way Regina had rarely tried to even conceive.

She was standing between them to protect Emma, certainly, but to protect her mother too, because if Emma were to unleash all the raw power inside of her then her mother would turn to ash.

“You can’t kill her,” she demanded. Begging wouldn’t work. Her mother thought begging weak. Logic. That was the way to her mother. “I need her. Henry needs her.”

“She’s not family Regina. That **girl** is the enemy.”

Her fingers flexed against Emma’s belly. Muscle, so very alive, twitched beneath her fingertips. “She’s Henry’s mother.”

She was why Regina **had** Henry. She gave him up and for ten years Regina knew joy. Emma Swan gave her that. No one else. And she came into this room to keep Regina safe. She put herself between the darkest sorcerers in their land and Regina because she was so very good and because she knew what sometimes even Regina doubted.

That Henry loved Regina. 

The fire in her mother’s hand flickered. Wavered in the face of a united front even Regina could not have anticipated. 

“You really would let her live,” her mother asked curiously.

“For Henry. Yes.”

“That’d you’d kowtow so easily to your own child. They need limits dear.”

“Yeah I’m sure you’re just real fond of enforcing the limits,” Emma opined.

The fire flared in tandem with the anger on her mother’s face and Regina actually found herself preparing for the violent assault of magic and fire.

But a fourth voice—more a scream of rage—interrupted them.

 

####

He was still **alive**? 

How…

Mary Margaret had killed him! She’d practically cut off his head! He was gurgling and twitching and definitely on his way out from the world of the living.

How the **hell** was Bluebeard still alive?

“I **command** death, girl. It obeys **my** will.”

Helpful.

Terrifying though.

“I thought we killed him more than that,” she mumbled.

“We? You let Snow help?”

“I distracted and she decapitated.”

She couldn’t see Regina’s face because the other woman had put herself between Emma and everyone and everything in the room, but she could **feel** that eye roll. 

“Never trust anything to Snow White.”

“You’re saying that because you’re biased.”

“Against the woman who—ah!” They lept in separate directions when Bluebeard **ripped a stone from the wall** and heaved it at their faces. Cora looked between them, the crazy bloody dead live guy and the junk on a pedestal in the middle of the room and naturally made a move for the pedestal.

Emma ran for it too, scooping everything up in her arms and then tossing it at Regina, who was the one with a bag to actually carry crap in. Regina caught it in sort of stunned shock but hurriedly shoved it into the bag.

Bluebeard roared again and ripped more stone away from the wall one handed to hurl at them. And Cora, because she was the worst, didn’t try to stop him. No, she used her magic to try to keep Emma in place. So Emma’d get her skull caved in and then Cora could claim it was all a tragic accident to the still pretty dumbfounded Regina.

She chanced exactly one look back at Regina and she was still standing there, rendered completely inert by her mother. Mary Margaret probably would have called it magic, but there hadn’t been magic on earth for years and Emma had seen that exact part of their predicament played out before.

If they were going to survive it was all on her.

She wadded magic up in her hand like dirty laundry and threw it at both of the people trying to kill her. In her head it was a cool moment where the magic flew out in two big waves.

The hold Cora had had disappeared and Emma spun around. She could already hear both of them getting up again, and feel their magics, vile and cold and awful, pressing at her back. She rushed past Regina, grabbing her hand and dragging her towards the big window facing out over the water.

More magic, hers, Cora’s, hell it could have been Bluebeard’s, blew the window inward, raining slivers of glass on them that forced her to raise a hand in protection. She yanked Regina even closer, hoping her big pirate coat would offer the other woman a little protection.

And then, when the sea breeze struck them and the yawn of the blue water spread before them she turned, wrapped both arms around Regina, and leapt.

 

####

They were plummeting to their deaths and it was the most excruciating thing because Emma Swan was holding her so close that Regina was doomed to die in her arms. Were it someone else she might have tucked her head and closed her eyes to avoid the blue sea rising up to meet them, but that would have made her last living thoughts be of Emma Swan and the way she smelled pleasant even after the dungeon.

So she shouted instead, intent on dying with a curse on her lips, “You idiot! What was the plan?!”

“Hope this necklace does teleporta—“

A swirl of pink smoke later and they were standing in the forest, far from battle and completely intact and still clutching each other like love—

She pushed herself away. “You **teleported** us?”

“My magic smoke is **pink**.”

Regina shoved her. “You did a teleportation spell.”

“Yeah. Because they were going to kill us. Can we discuss the flipping **pink** smoke?”

“Manifestation of your magic—“

“I am not pink.”

She jabbed her finger into the meat of Emma’s shoulder. “That is **not** the point. Teleportation takes years to master.”

“But you did it.”

“Because I’m a magical genius. I could thread a needle with magic. You’re…you’re a bull in a china shop.”

“Ignoring the fact that you basically just called me stupid I was talking about the locket. You said to use it as a blueprint. So I did.”

She said it without guile.

Just…expressed this trust in Regina that she was a fool to express. Didn’t she understand what Regina was? Didn’t she understand that if it weren’t for Henry she’d be—didn’t she get it?

“Teleportation isn’t something youtrust to a **locket**.”

“It was all we had.”

“Is that what you do Emma? Place all your hope on a whim?”

“No. Not used to.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin. “But you were the only one to be really honest about all this magic crap and still be yourself after, you know, finally being honest about the magic crap. So I trusted in you. And you want me to live for the same reason I need you alive. So I trusted in Henry. And in your feelings for him.”

What a beautiful damned fool. “You’re an idiot.”

“And you’re a broken record your majesty.”

She needed some sort of shift. Something to get away from these little smiles they were giving each other and this pleasant peace with a woman she could not care for. “And you were awful dealing with Bluebeard.”

“Yeah. What the hell is up with him? Because when I say Mary Margaret nearly decapitated him I mean I saw the inside parts of people I never wanted to see.”

“He took a bite of the peach.”

Emma frowned, “Is that a euphemism?”

“It’s a peach. One I took from the Middle Kingdom.”

“A Peach of Immortality?” Emma threw her hands up and then trudged off in no direction in particular. “Only you would steal fruit that makes people immortal from a goddess and then just hold onto it.” She called back accusingly, “You’re a hoarder Regina.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You steal fruit that **makes you immortal** and then you don’t eat it? You just hold onto it. Why?”

“Because—“

She rounded on Regina, “Ah ha. Right. Because you hoard. Do you realize how much easier this would have been if we, I don’t know, **couldn’t die**?”

Emma shoved her hands into her pockets and continued on her aimless path. Regina jogged to keep up, “You may not have noticed, but I actually was immortal. For thirty—“

“Twenty-eight.”

“Years. It’s not simple. It’s not just a power up like in one of Henry’s insipid games. The gift it bestows is—“

“Pointless now because Bluebeard got it.”

“He got a piece. When you were tossing magic items around frivolously you somehow managed to throw it to me.” It was sitting in the bag slung over her shoulder and bumping against her hip. There alongside the shoes. So much magic in such a small place. It actually tingled. “And before you ask, no, I’m not just handing it out now either.”

“Well, not like I’d want it. You tend to poison the food before you give it to me.”

“Are you finished?”

Emma narrowed her eyes but considered the rhetorical as though it were not. “No,” she then said, “but I’ll get back to the rest of the rant after you tell me what the hell you’re doing hoarding peaches in the first place.”

“ **A** peach. And I was thinking…” Of Henry. Never sick. Young and healthy for five thousand years. Safe. Protected well beyond Regina’s own life span.

“You…you want to give it to Henry.”

“Don’t you,” she shot back.

Emma stepped into Regina’s space. That nasty way she always did when Regina was brittle and she wanted to—to confer hope. To offer **comfort**. “I don’t think it’s our place to dictate our son’s future like that.”

“This just **gives** him a future.”

“Yeah, but it takes away a choice. One that isn’t ours to make.”

“So I should eat it myself? Give it to you?”

“Destroy it.” How could she be so close that she could take Regina’s hand and squeeze it and it wouldn’t even bother Regina? It was just a touch. A familiar one. “We’re human Regina. Whatever that may give us it would end that.”

Her eyes were unwillingly dragged to the lips that could utter such a statement. That could believe such a thing so fervently. They were pretty lips. A little dry. Terribly pink. Firm and resolute. But perhaps soft…

No. “It’s not your decision Ms. Swan.”

She expected a fight, but just got a crooked smile. As delicate as the skin of that precious fruit in her bag. “You’re right.” And I trust you. Those were the words unsaid. Words too sweet for the two of them. Too kind.

And words she knew with terrible certainty were far too true.

Emma. The beautiful damned fool.

 

####

It took Regina longer than Emma would have expected to ask where the hell they were going. “Hook’s ship. He sailed it down the coast and I’m using the whatever in the locket to find it.”

It was a mysterious pull and it should have terrified her. A day ago magic had been a concept. Now it was a real thing boiling inside of her and yearning for escape.

“Good. We can collect Snow White and finally be done with this accursed place.”

True, “Or we could maybe stop Bluebeard and your mom and then get the hell out of here.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Because the evil?”

It didn’t register with Regina.

“Right. You’re evil too. Sorry.” She stopped. “So Bluebeard is psychotic Regina, and I rather not have him out there plotting revenge and just popping up in Storybrooke at some point, and your mom’s pretty much just as bad and actually has a **way** to Storybrooke.”

“We just need the compass from her. If we have that then neither of them can find their way there.”

“ **Just**? We have to stop them. Permanently.”

In hindsight she should have planned that better. There had to be some kind of way to let a woman know her mother was evil and needed to be stopped at all costs.

Maybe a card? 

Regina recoiled. “I’m not killing her.”

“And when she gets to Storybrooke and kills everyone else?”

“That won’t happen.”

“How? Because seriously Regina, if you have a plan to stop her that doesn’t involve killing I’m all ears.”

Regina swallowed, working her jaw briefly. “You would really let her live. As evil as she is?”

“If there’s a way. Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because the alternative is you watching your mom die, or killing her yourself and I’m not a monster.”

Regina laughed, “Ten years ago I would have gladly manipulated you to murder Snow. Or her you.”

“I’m trying to be helpful here, but if you’d rather be an asshole then keep on going please. I would love yet **another** reason to keep you away from Henry.”

“You wouldn’t—“

Damn it. This happened every time with this stupid frickin— “No. Of course not.” She was just so **easy** to fight with. Round and round they’d go. The whole world could probably go poof and they’d be busy in a corner trying to get one up on each other. And when Regina was defensive? Hoo boy. “Look, can you just tell me your plan.”

“Convince her to stay.”

“How?”

“That’s none of your busines—“

“It is. You want me to go on faith.”

“You had an easy enough time when you were dragging me off the side of a tower.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“This is your mother Regina. And she’s dangerous. Most of all to you.”

“She would never hurt me.”

“She already has.”

“You don’t—“

“Foster kid remember? And not the healthy kind. The kind that ran away. I was a kid slipping through the cracks and its because of these people. They’re moms and dads but we’re not their kids. We’re…objects.”

Regina shook her head. A tear, one humiliating tear, flew from her cheek at the motion. “She loves me.”

Emma had to close her eyes. Darkness was easier than that earnestness. “Maybe. But when Bluebeard attacked us she didn’t fight to protect you.” She dared look, knowing her words, if truly heard, would be just as destructive as any of the magic they’d faced.

And they were. Regina was perfectly still. Too hurt to hide it.

Footsteps in the brush should have stirred one of them. Regina should have looked or Emma, but Regina was caught up in her head and Emma was caught up watching a woman she hated experience something wretched.

Why did it ache?

That big horse of Regina’s, the magical one that had saved their lives, trotted out from between the trees. Like it had felt Regina’s need for comfort it walked right up to her and bumped its head against her elbow until she turned to bury her head in the horse’s neck.

Mary Margaret. Even Henry. Everyone said Regina was a monster. But the woman clutching the horse was too familiar to Emma.

Not a monster. But the product of one.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We’re rapidly approaching the end of part one of the Monomythical Adventures of Regina Mills and Emma Swan! I’m as shocked as you by how quickly we’ve reached this point. The story will continue in Part 2, “Toxic is the Unyielding Love.” I won’t spoil things but I can promise a cracklicious adventure with a masquerade ball, wicked witches, steampunk, and a badass portal jumper from Kansas.
> 
> As always feedback of all kinds is much loved!
> 
> WARNING: The last part of this chapter is hella violent and dark. If you’re an evil villain and your comeuppance is due it may be triggering.

They rode bareback. It was a style of riding Regina found exhilarating. There was a degree of unity when lacking a saddle or reigns that gave her peace and she would gladly admit that she enjoyed the way people watched her skill with envy. Even Snow, beloved by all, had harbored jealousy of Regina’s horsemanship.

Snow’s daughter did not. Largely because Emma’s experience with horses was clearly limited to her time in the Enchanted Forest and she had no conception of what made a horsewoman skilled and unskilled.

“Loosen up,” she lectured Emma for the third time.

Emma wriggled on poor Gauvin’s back, clenching her thighs and digging bony bits of herself into his fleshier ones. 

Gauvin shivered.

“You are going to force him to buck and end up on your rear Emma.”

“You will too.” She grunted and tried again.

They certainly didn’t have time for lollygagging, but Emma’s words earlier and Regina’s reaction to them were still all an embarrassing mark on Regina’s mind. She’d wept. Into a horse’s neck. While Emma had watched with pity.

So she dug her heels in and Gauvin bucked and Emma sailed while Regina stayed seated.

The woman looked up from her painful looking position in the only substantial mud for miles and scowled. “You two did that on purpose.”

Regina feigned ignorance and Gauvin whinnied in protest.

Emma stood and shook herself like a puppy, mud flying in every direction. “Is there a cleaning spell in the locket?”

“No. And it’s not a spellbook for your personal use. It’s a gui—“

“Guide. I know. I know. How about you? Care to clean the mud off?”

“With what? My tongue?”

In some distant place pirates and centaurs waged war. Overheard birds chattered. The wind blew in the trees. But between them it was all quite silent.

Regina fought the blush she knew to be rising.

Emma raised an eyebrow.

“I…” her hand flew to the bruise around her neck, “I still can’t do magic. Not while this is here.”

“Oh,” Emma said evenly.

“You can…walk along side us.”

“What,” she said in outrage.

“You’re covered in **mud.** Gauvin doesn’t need that. A horse’s coat is—“

“I am not walking. **You** walk.”

“I’m the one who actually understands how to ride a horse. If you rode Gauvin by yourself you’d probably end up in—in Agrabah.”

“Or I’d fall off after two steps. Can you just let me back up on the horse?”

The woman really did look awful. And exhausted. And she **had** battle Bluebeard and teleported them both while they were falling to their deaths. It had only been a few hours since Emma had woken from her brief respite but day after day of running and fighting and surviving in dungeons were taking its toll on the woman.

“I want you to know I’m only letting you back up here because I’m taking **pity** on you.”

Emma stuck out a muddy hand which Regina grasped tightly. She pulled her up. “It’s okay,” Emma said. “I pity you all the time too.”

And dropped her just as quickly.

“Oh come on!”

“I do not desire or merit your pity Miss Swan.”

“What happened to Emma?”

“If you’re going to act like an infant you can crawl across the ground like one, **Miss Swan**.”

“I really thought we reached a point, **Regina** , where you could call me by my first name.”

“Fine. **Emma** , if you’re going to act like an infant you can crawl across the ground like one.”

“You’re really proud of that one aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she retorted hotly.

Emma grinned, and in spite of it all Regina smiled too. She abhorred others laughing at her. It was anger racing under her skin. But not with Emma. Not in that moment.

She let out a little laugh that Emma didn’t comment on and held her hand out again. “Come on.”

Movement in the brush interrupted them and Regina swung Gauvin around to put him between Emma and whatever was rustling there.

Then, of all things, Hwin emerged from the greenery. The pale horse caught sight of the dark one Regina rode upon and whinnied in delight, rearing up playfully.

Gauvin started to do the same and only stopped when Regina’s thighs tightened and she tugged on his mane.

“What—“ Emma started, “How the hell many horses **are** there in this frickin’ forest?”

“They’re magical. They seek out their mistress.” Or in Hwin’s case Gauvin. The horses nuzzled one another.

“Yeah, I don’t think that one was looking for either of us Regina.”

“Perhaps.” She leaned over Gauvin and grasped Hwin’s mane, carefully repositioning the horse. “At least now we don’t have to share.”

Emma eyed the paler horse warily. “She’s not going to try and kill me?”

“Hwin is actually much more docile than Gauvin.”

“That translates to lame.”

“No. It translates to docile. She’ll keep you safe should you trust her.”

Emma gave herself a running start and leapt onto Hwin’s back landing on her chest and having to ungraciously twist and scoot to properly find her seat. “I’m doing a lot of trusting these days,” she grunted as she maneuvered.

Regina raised an eyebrow as she watched, “I noted. And good thing to. A lesser horse would have thrown you just now.”

“We didn’t all get riding lessons for years from Mommy and Daddy now did we?”

The bitch—“Come on.” She turned Gauvin around and forged ahead.

Emma called after her, “That’s not even the right way your majesty!”

She pulled Gauvin to a stop. 

Emma brought Hwin up beside her, turned the horse a **fraction** and headed off. “ **This** is the right way.”

“There’s a special place in hell for you Emma Swan,” she muttered playfully.

…

Playfully?

When had that happened?

 

####

Did hell exist?

She’d brought it up before figuring that if Regina had been stealing from Chinese deities she probably knew if Christian eternal damnation was a real thing too. But Regina had blown her off and she didn’t really want to press the question again and find out that, like, they were already **in** hell and no one had bothered to tell her.

But Regina had said that there was a special place in hell for Emma. So hell had to exist in some fashion. At least in Regina’s head.

Unless it was the curse making Regina think hell was a thing.

“Were you cursed?”

Regina glanced at her, “Excuse me?”

“With everyone else. Were you ever cursed too?”

“I was not.”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“How bored did you get being the only one knowing what was happening?”

Regina’s lips quirked up, “Very.”

She didn’t get it. Or Regina. Cursing everyone to Maine was really a terrible thing? Yeah, it had sucked for Emma, and Mary Margaret had been terribly angsty for about six months because of David, but for the most part no one actually **knew** they’d had something and lost it. They were just regular people living in a world devoid of ogres and magic and full of things like television and toilet paper.

“Why’d you come up with the curse anyways?”

“I wanted everyone to suffer.”

“But if they don’t know they’re suffering does it even count?”

Regina brought her horse to a stop so Emma did too. She leaned across the space between their horses, resting her elbow on her knee. “For a week I took your mother to your father’s bedside and I watched her yearn for happiness and receive **nothing** in return. I watched Rumpelstiltskin limp down the street divested of all his magic. The people begged me. Feared me. **Respected** me.”

That was it?  “So for a week you were a god. Great. And the other twenty-seven years and fifty-one weeks?”

“I was free.”

She was trapped. Stuck in her little idyllic town where nothing ever happened and the clock never ticked. Until—

“I had Henry,” Regina said fondly. She straightened back up and kicked her horse back into motion. “And they had nothing.”

They broke through the trees and back out into open grassland. The horses both whickered with joy and Emma had to lean forward and wrap herself around the one she was on to keep from falling off.

Regina was much calmer, but the wind coming off the sea caught in her hair and she closed her eyes for a moment’s peace and Emma was awestruck by the change.

Everyone got hung up on her being this evil queen, and fair enough, but twenty-eight years of monotony and a little bit of happiness and smoothed away the brash edges of the queen. Polished her until something **human** shimmered beneath.

Something—someone content not to be a vengeful villain. Not if she had love.

 

####

Killian Jones had to have known they’d find the horses or had means to teleport otherwise he never would have moved his ship so far down the coast. As it was they made it there before midday. Had they been on foot or even an average horse it would have been past dark and they likely wouldn’t have even **seen** the ship from the coast.

The sails had been put away and the ship was tucked into a cove they had to ride through a copse of trees to find. They left Gauvin and Hwin on the beach and walked out into water that came up to their chests.

“Least I’m finally clean,” Emma muttered, scrubbing at the mud still clinging to her coat and splattered on her neck.

Hook spied them and leaned over the rail. “Fancy’d a swim, ladies?”

“There seemed to be a distinct lack of skiffs,” Regina called up. “A ladder please.”

“You’re telling me that between the two of you you couldn’t just conjure a boat?”

“Regina’s still got that bruise limiting her magic and apparently I’m banned from doing anything more than shields because I might unmake the fabric of existence.” Emma held up her fingers to create quotes around the last bit.

Which was exactly what Regina had said when Emma had suggested the boat idea on the shore. The woman was far too eager to trust in the locket and whatever Regina might have unconsciously put into it to be a safe practitioner.

Above them Hook sighed and disappeared from view. A few seconds later a wooden ladder clattered over the side and narrowly missed Regina’s head.

“You could have just called out,” he said from his vantage point. 

“And you would have come to get us,” Emma asked skeptically from the bottom rung.

“No. But there’s at least two bleeding hearts on board who would probably row out to fetch you.”

Regina stepped over the side and onto the deck. “Two?”

Emma came up the side and Regina pulled her up, but Emma directed her question to Hook, “How is she?”

“Not good love.”

“Shit—“ Emma scrambled the rest of the way over and dashed off deck and down below to Hook’s quarters.

Hook made to follow but Regina caught him by the arm and turned him around, “What’s happened?”

“Snow White’s hurt.”

“And?” Snow was forever injuring herself. It was hardly something to merit anxious looks.

Hook avoided both gloom and glee when he delivered his appraisal. “And we might be taking one less person with us to your land.”

 

####

She didn’t stop when she entered the room and found Mary Margaret pale and barely conscious on the bed. She didn’t stop when Mulan and Aurora both tried to step forward and console her. She didn’t stop when she loomed over Mary Margaret.

She stopped when she took a seat on the edge of the bed and took a damp, limp hand in hers and squeezed and Mary Margaret didn’t squeeze back, but smiled.

“Emma,” she breathed as though it were her last breath.

“Hey.”

Mary Margaret’s voice was heavy with emotion—verging on tears. “You…came.” Like she was actually **surprised**.

“I rode as fast as I could.”

“I’m glad.”

She brushed some of the dark hair away from Mary Margaret’s face. A face with the same shape as her son’s.

She’d never noticed that before.

The locket beneath her shirt rattled against the chains of her other necklaces when she leaned forward. She’d meant to kiss Mary Margaret. Some sense of familial duty demanded it. But the locket—she could heal her. Fix the problem with the locket. There had to be a path in it.

She took Mary Margaret’s other hand and cupped both between her own. She brought them to her lips. Anyone looking on might have thought she was praying.

And maybe she was. Begging the magic in the locket, the magic Regina had put there, to heal the mother she’d only just found. The mother she desperately needed to keep. The friend she’d made and could not lose.

Her eyes closed in benediction. The magic inside of her welled. Churned.

Then a hand on her shoulder stopped her.

“You can’t.” Regina’s even voice, void of emotion. “Healing is far too delicate a work to use the locket for.”

“That’s what you said about teleportation.”

“You gambled then. This is tempting fate.”

“I’m not letting her die.”

“You don’t have a choice Emma.”

She jerked her shoulder away. “Like hell I don’t.”

The magic seethed in the locket. Roiled up and out. 

Hands grabbed both of her shoulders and violently yanked her back. She collided against a table that kept her from falling and pushed away from it back towards Mary Margaret. But Regina stepped between them.

“I won’t let you throw your life away.”

“You mean you can’t.”

She pursed her lips, “You’re right.”

“You need me alive so Henry won’t hate you,” Emma prodded. 

Something shined in Regina’s eye. She blinked and it disappeared. “I need you alive.”

“And I need her!” The desperation in her voice didn’t move Regina. If anything it forced her into a defensive position. So she let her voice fall a little. Let the truth out, but not so desperately. “I just got her back.”

“I know,” Regina said softly. She glanced at Mary Margaret, “And I know her too. If you killed yourself trying to save her it would **destroy** her.”

“Shouldn’t you step aside then? Isn’t that what you want?”

“I want Henry far more. And **he** wants you.”

“Then we’ve got a problem. Because I am **not** letting Mary Margaret die.”

“And I’m not losing you.”

A cacophony in her head. White noise. Thoughts scattered. Regina…looked stunned by her admission and Emma…she couldn’t. She didn’t—

“Ladies.” Hook clattered into the room, stopping where Mulan and Aurora had stood. She hadn’t even seen them go. “We’ve a problem,” he said.

“It can wait,” she snapped back.

“No, it can’t.”

Regina squared her shoulders and turned to look over her shoulder at him. “What’s happened?”

“Bluebeard’s found us.”

 

####

Bluebeard had found them.

Another woman would have inferred from that that her mother was dead. Regina knew better. Whatever was out there was what Cora had let live. Or what had escaped from her.

Emma looked at her own mother prone on Hook’s bed and back to Regina, but she quickly averted her eyes when they’d nearly made eye contact. Regina’s silly words, her silly tactless and too honest words, still hung between them.

She didn’t want to lose Emma. For Henry. **Henry**.

Henry would hate Regina if she returned without her.

Only…

Damn. She would feel a little contrite too. Emma was actually kind. Not like her mother. She was painfully aware of Regina, but was kind in spite of it. Demanding and frustrating and **Henry’s mother**.

Yes. Yes, that was why she’d said it.

Because of Henry.

“Well,” she said aloud, “I expect we should deal with the matter of the Duke then?”

“No,” Emma said, her eyes unfocused in thought, “No, you stay here.”

“Excuse me?” Regina said at the same time as Hook.

“Figure out a way to save her.”

“The bruise—“

Emma stepped into Regina’s space. Took her hand and squeezed it painfully. “Figure it out Regina. I’ll handle Bluebeard.”

“For this trip to be successful we all must live Emma.”

Emma glanced back at her mother, “She has to live,” she said distantly, “or you fail Henry.” As she walked past Regina she leaned in close enough that Regina felt her breath on her ear, “So figure it out.”

Emma departed and Hook went with her, leaving Regina alone with the woman lying on the bed. Snow’s eyes were closed but her face was pinched in a frown.

“How much were you conscious for dear?”

Those green eyes like her daughter’s, like Regina’s son’s, opened. They couldn’t quite focus on Regina. One pupil was larger than the other, making the eye almost entirely black.

“All of it,” Snow said softly.

Regina loomed over her and studied her fallen enemy a moment. Was it irony lying on the bed? Her enemy near death’s door, her life in Regina’s hands, and Regina…Regina bound by necessity to save her.

“She’d have me heal you.”

“She thinks you’ve changed.” Snow smiled weakly, “My daughter’s an optimist.”

“Yes. She is.” Regina took a seat on the edge of the mattress, “Our positions reversed, would you save me?”

Those green eyes focused a brief moment, “No.”

Regina sighed. “Now were I Rumpelstiltskin I would offer you a choice Snow. Your life for a favor. But I’m not the gilded crocodile and I have no use of any favor you’d dare offer.”

She smiled. “I’m glad I’m right about you.”

“I suppose when death is so close it’s always good to know that you were **right**. Is it truly consolation?”

“It means you lose Regina. No one will ever trust you when they find out.”

“ **If** they find out.”

Killing her in Snow’s state would be a simple matter of placing her hand over her airways and holding tight. She’d feel those last few gasps of air against her palm and then Snow would be still.

“My daughter trusts you. In spite of everything.”

She turned away and plucked at her damp skirts. “Yes, well Emma is a fool.”

Snow seemed like she meant to touch Regina, but her hand only rose and fell. “I trusted you,” she said quietly.

Anger flared, “As I trusted you Snow. And how well that served me.”

“We were both fools.”

“Daniel **died** because of trust.”

“Daniel died so you could be queen.” Regina looked back sharply. Surprised to find Snow more lucid than she’d been seconds before. “Like my father,” she spoke hotly, “They were killed so **you** could wear a crown.”

“No.” No, Daniel died because Snow betrayed her. Leopold died because Sidney was so gullible.

“And now you want to go back. Where everyone hates you and you’re living a lie on borrow time. Why Regina? Why not stay here? You and your mother could rule. Together.”

That would be simple. Find her mother and apologize. They’d embrace. She’d be warm and soft and smell like the happy part of childhood. She’d keep Regina safe. Protect her from the monsters and defend her to the righteous like Snow.

But she wasn’t the only one to protect Regina.

Emma knew her. Knew how black Regina’s heart was. Hated her even. And yet she still stepped between her and death. Still risked her own life to protect Regina’s.

There were those paths again. Those choices offered up. There was the mother and kingdom Regina had once desired. And there was that little white house with the apple tree and Henry and an ally. Emma, who knew her, and was kind in spite of it.

A body thumped loudly on the deck above them. The unctuous touch of blood magic twisted at Regina’s insides.

That woman was up above. Fighting for Snow. And Regina. And leaving her here alone.

That fool trusted her.

And Henry trusted her too.

She leaned close to Snow, “You seem to think you still understand me Snow. That my **mother** could be enough. But there is only one thing that matters to me now, and it isn’t her, and it isn’t you.”

“Henry.”

“Yes. **He** matters.” She ran her hand down Snow’s face. Stroked skin as soft as a child’s. The woman quivered Regina’s touch. “He matters Snow.” She leaned in so she could hear the gasp of horror she knew would come. She wanted to relish the little bit of pain she could inflict. “More than you **ever** did.”

 

####

Bluebeard **had** found them. And he was sitting on the deck at a table with Aurora and Mulan on either side of him, both wrapped up in chains. He noted Emma and Hook and directed his question to the guy, naturally.

“Just this one?”

“Snow White’s been hurt. Regina’s with her,” Hook replied.

Bluebeard nodded. “Then I have no more use for you pirate.” Hook was promptly launched ten feet up in the air where he hung inert. “Though I suppose a larger audience would be pleasant for this work. You should watch. Learn something from your better.”

He swung his hand and Hook swung too, smacking into the mast. The ropes there seemed to come alive then, and snaked out over Hook’s body, trussing him to the wood.

At Bluebeard’s side Mulan twitched.

“Careful girl,” he said without even looking. “I find the taste of your kind unpleasant, but keep trying to escape and I’ll make an exception.”

“You want to eat her?” Emma knew the guy was disgusting but that seemed. Over the top.

“Regina told me all about this little world she cursed you to. How we are all stories there. So tell me girl, what is my story?”

“You kill your wives.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah your story is not exactly Disney friendly pal. Not a real popular one.”

“No. I suppose the truth of what I do would not be popular in a world run by women.”

She snorted, “Seriously? Where I’m from is a helluva lot different, but assholes like you still exist and still have power.” He scowled. Score one for Emma. She came closer, sauntering across the deck. “Way I see it, you’re pretty ordinary. Only you apparently eat your victims before burying the remains.”

“I gain power.”

“No, you make yourself feel better. That’s what perverts like you do.”

“Girl you have no conscionable understanding of the power I hold.”

“Oh, see that’s where you’re wrong.” She splayed her fingers on the table and leaned forward. “I know all about your power and where it comes from.” She knew about the girls. Their screams. Regina had showed her how they died. Showed her how to see that magic pulled unwillingly from them. The magic they were sacrificed for. “And I don’t see any innocent dead girls here for you to syphon off of.”

He glanced at Aurora. Then Mulan. Both women glared back.

“Yeah,” Emma said with a grin, “You’re surrounded by worldly women pal.”

“The despoiled still have power.”

“So why don’t you come and try to take some.”

The bastard grinned, “I was hoping you’d offer girl.”

He disappeared in a puff of smoke brown and red like rust. Then appeared before her. His meaty hand reached for her and Emma threw up a wall of magic, sending them both flying backwards from the point of contact.

It had dazed her more than she expected, and Bluebeard recovered first, once more disappearing and reappearing in a puff of smoke that smelled like rotted meat. He hauled her violently to her feet by the hair, tugging painfully at the roots and flashing those yellowed teeth of his in a broad smile. 

“You think brute strength will defeat me.”

“It was a plan,” she grunted.

Magic welled in her hand. Raw power. She threw her weight into the punch, but he easily caught her fist, squeezing hard and sending pain skittering up her arm.

“Magic is not just power, girl. Magic is finesse. Something you lack.” He jerked her closer.

“No,” she said through gritted teeth, “I don’t.”

This was one of the first holds she really learned to escape. The guy would grab her from behind and hold her by the hair and torso. It was an awful sensation. Like she’d never escape. But it was also one she knew all too fucking—she dragged her heavy pirate boot down his shin and onto his foot and swung her elbow back, pooling magic into the blow.

Bluebeard grunted and his vice-like grip on her slackened enough for her to shove him away and turn around. She put more magic into the kick she then leveled at his groin.

There was a sickening whump from the contact. Bluebeard’s face turned violet in pain and his beady little eyes bulged in his head.

Behind and above her Mulan, Aurora and Hook all winced in sympathy.

“See where I grew up,” she told the drooling man on the deck, “we didn’t have magic. Just assholes like you throwing their weight around. And I got good at throwing back.”

She kicked again, the top of her foot connecting with his jaw. Blood and spittle splattered across the deck.

“Behind all your magic and murder is just a sick little bully. And I’ve had enough of you to last a lifetime.”

She leveled one more kicked at his head. It would hopefully be enough to knock him unconscious. Then they’d…bury him or something. Wrap him in chains and throw his immortal ass in the ocean.

Only at the last second something flashed in his hand and something warm spread quickly across her thigh.

Behind her Aurora shouted. Mulan struggled.

She looked down.

Why was it red?

She tried to walk away but the red was everywhere and one leg was all funny.

She fell.

Was she…cut?

“All I need is a woman’s blood,” he said. A pink mist of it covered his face and beard. “Some of yours will even do.”

He planted his hand in the pool of red racing down her thigh and spreading across the deck. With his clean hand he ripped his shirt open and painted his hairy chest with her blood.

She scooted away. More blood pumped from the cut—no gash. It was huge. How…

There was…there was an artery in the leg. An important one. Hitting the inside of the thigh was what they always said. Go for the groin but that inside of the thigh was just as important. And he had hit it. Sliced her open with a knife that clattered to the deck. The blade shined. Silver. And red.

He stood. The hits she **knew** had hurt him weren’t even there. He looked like he could go another hundred rounds. He rolled his massive shoulders back. Popped that neck as thick as Emma’s thigh.

“That is the beauty of your simple sex,” he said proudly. “There’s a never ending supply of you. There to bleed like stuck pigs. And your blood,” he held a biliously red colored hand up to his nose and inhaled deeply. “There’s power in you girl. More than you’d ever learn to wield. I must thank you properly for it.”

The blood on the deck— **Emma’s** blood—seemed to drip **upward**. Rising from the deck. Hovering in the air.

“You called me a bully,” he said evenly. “But I think you misunderstand what I am.” The blood formed something there in the air. A sword. Shining and red and black. It didn’t make sense. How could he make a sword—how could it be made from her?

“I am an artist of the macabre.”  The sword turned into a heart, beating wildly in the air. Pulsing with the blood that had been shed from Emma’s own body. “You and your friends are merely my canvas.” 

The heart constricted and Emma’s own heart seemed to stop in her chest. She gasped. He laughed. Blood dripped from the thing hovering in the air. And from her leg. From her.

Damn it.

Damn it to hell.

She’d lost.

She’d—

Clapping. Slow even clapping.

Just hands flashing in the shadows. Then white teeth. Bright brown eyes.

Regina emerged from Hook’s quarters below and the shadows themselves seemed to cling to her like a cloak, darkening the deck and following her eagerly. Chasing the light away.

“What a lovely show. However long did you plot that little line Duke? ‘Artist of the macabre?’ From a butcher like you?”

He spun around on his heel, his arms open, and his wrists weak, “Regina, so glad you could join us.”

“Yes, sorry about that. I was busy.”

“Killing Snow White?”

Her smile was…cold. Sphinx-like. “I was enjoying watching my enemy slowly die, and then I hear you up here and I had to see it all for myself.”

“Your allies grovel?”

“No,” her voice dropped an octave, “your stupidity.”

The bastard bristled in place. 

Regina approached nonchalantly. “Emma and these others may be unfamiliar with the nuances of magic, but I am not. Your power comes from the corpses you bleed dry and we are on open sea, with nary a dead girl in sight.”

“Soon,” he challenged, waving a bloody hand in Emma’s direction.

Too soon for Emma’s comfort. Her fingers felt cold. Even breathing seemed to be a trial.

Regina raked her eyes over Emma. Appraising her like meat. But just for a moment. Then there was a brief flash of…something…something human.

“Yes, she’s bleeding out. Giving you all that power within. And here I stand. Another of your victims. What was it you said about me? I had no power?”

“I destroyed your path to it.”

“As long as I am in your domain and the bruise holds.” She then exposed her neck. A precious expanse of unmottled flesh. “Fortunately I heal fast.”

Bluebeard growled, “Not fast enough—“

His hand jabbed out and Regina went completely rigid. 

Then she laughed.

And shuddered, shaking off his magic.

“That was adorable. Any other spells?”

He squeezed his hand into a fist and Regina mockingly pretended to gasp for air. It ended in another gale of laughter. “You fool,” she crowed. “You’ve left your place of power,” she said merrily. Then her voice dropped again, “And entered mine.”

She didn’t even have to raise her hand. She simply narrowed her eyes and Bluebeard fell to his knees. The sound of the bones striking the deck was painful. Something cracked. Bluebeard cried out.

“Silence.”

Thread unspooled from his shirt. Rose up to the level of the bastard’s eye. He tracked the movement and Regina leaned forward waving her hand back and forth, the thread mirroring her movement. She flick her finger and before Bluebeard could scream the thread had passed through his lips and sewn them shut.

“Better,” she said darkly.

She snapped her fingers and Hook fell from the mast and the chains fell off Aurora and Mulan both. One of the chairs reappeared before the still kneeling Bluebeard.

Regina took a seat.

“Now. What am I to do with you? You’ve taken a bite of the Peach of Immortality. Not enough to be immortal. That name is a misnomer. It merely gives you years without death. And you’d consumed enough for maybe two, three years?”

She snapped again and the chains that had bound Mulan and Aurora wrapped around him. He tried to force the thread in his lips open with his jaw which only made Regina laugh again.

Mulan knelt next to Emma, “Are you all right?”

“My…leg.”

“He’s severed the artery. Aurora I need you scarf.”

The woman was going to try and save her by making a frickin’ tourniquet out of a princess’s scarf and her own sword. 

“No need dear.” 

Purple smoke encased Emma’s leg and when it was gone so was the gash that had been killing her. Mulan and Emma both prodded at her still soaked pants.

“It’s completely—“

“—Healed.”

Regina didn’t comment. She’d returned her focus to their new captive. “I suppose I could bury you. Or trap you in a cave. That worked well enough for the centaurs.”

She ran her hand through his beard briefly before tugging on it. He grunted in pain and glared.

“Regina,” Emma warned.

“But the problem is no one will know what became of you and those pirates you gathered might actually,” she shrugged, “miss you. And we can’t have that,” she said conspiratorially.

“What’s the plan then,” Emma asked.

Regina ignored her. “I need them to know that even a world away there is a reason I am their Evil Queen and you’re the footnote in a children’s collection of stories.”

Words like that weren’t meant to be savored. But they rolled off Regina’s tongue, and her voice was low and dangerous. That Evil Queen. Every time Emma thought she’d seen the legend some new point of cruelty would appear—a dark and inescapable spot of darkness.

She limped over. Her body was still weak. Her head was pounding. Her mouth was dry. Her leg didn’t want to work right. She reached out for Regina’s shoulder in part to complete that physical connection—to pull the woman back from the precipice—and because she didn’t trust her own legs.

Awfulness flared at the touch. The locket burned like ice. The touch of magic crawled under Emma’s skin.

And Regina. She saw her. Saw the monster kept barely at bay and the woman too weak to fight it. Too tired to fight it.

“Regina.”

The evil, and there was no other word to really explain it but that one, surged through Emma.

Bluebeard screamed against the thread. 

“Regina please.”

The queen, the mayor, the woman who would be Henry’s mother, stood. “Step back Miss Swan,” she declared imperiously.

Bluebeard stood too, but not of his own volition. 

“That power of hers?” She pressed her hand against the blood on his bare chest. “That power you wanted to claim for yourself. It’s already been claimed.” 

His eyes bulged again.

“She can’t access it. She’s so inexperienced I’ve no doubt she burn up if she tried. But **I** have experience to spare.”

His muscles bulged. Pressed against his skin. Like…like they were trying to force their way out. The evil leached the rest of the strength from Emma.

“I’m barely tapping into the power she possesses.”

Skin tore. Excruciatingly slowly.

“Regina!”

“Shall we see my dear, if the power of the Savior supersedes that precious bite of a peach?”

It wasn’t a real question. If it had been a real question Regina would have waited. She would have removed the thread from his lips. Would have, Emma didn’t know, sat him down. Talked.

But Regina just snapped. That was it. Thumb rubbed against forefinger so quick a sound emerged. It took a second. A second in which everything inside was suddenly on the outside and everything that was human was suddenly not.

One moment there stood before them a man in excruciating pain. The next a red mist as he was torn apart.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! The end of Part One, and I would very much characterize it as a PART and not a book. This is not a standalone tale, you will NOT be satisfied with the ending (well maybe a little), it DOES end on a massive cliffhanger.
> 
> But the next part is such a major, major shift that it felt kind of weird not to split it up. So yes things continue in “Toxic is the Unyielding Love” and the plot will probably be pretty apparent from the final moments of this chapter.
> 
> As for last chapter HOLY HELL thank you for the tremendous response! I was in awe of the feedback you all left and am truly humbled by it. Now on with the show…

The mist falling made a sound. Like snow on leaves. Droplets of red, many too small for the naked eye, came to rest on the deck so softly and so loudly all at once. 

The gasps of the sleeping princess and her warrior woman, the sharp inhalation of the pirate, even the beat of the sea against the boat were all drowned out by the fall of mist.

And by the heavy breathing of a woman forever changed.

Emma had witnessed it, the part of Regina she tried very hard to control, the part of her that loved the pain inflicted and the misery exacted. She **thrived** on it, almost as much as she did the touch of her son.

Or even a look of understanding from the woman behind her.

Who was still panting. Her hand was on Regina’s arm and she could **feel** the blood coursing through Emma. The rise and fall of a chest. The pulse moved by panic. 

Regina though, was not breathing. The air was inert in her lungs. The heart motionless in her chest. That panting. That rainfall of a dead man’s blood. Those were the only sounds.

Those and the thoughts in her head.

She’d felt her magic return down below. Watching the pain alight on Snow’s face had been a balm and the flow of power had seared through Regina with a force unmatched. She’d then slipped the moribund woman into a deep and healing sleep and crept up the steps to the deck to find horror awaiting her. She found the woman who dared trust her pale and dying on polished wood and the bastard who’d interrupted everything looming gleefully over her.

It hadn’t been a snap inside of her. Just…a loosening of bindings she’d kept in place ever since Henry had come into her life. And each moment she’d allowed more of her basest self to be bared she felt more and more power. And pleasure. She’d forgotten the joy of making another dance. Forgotten how sumptuous it felt to twist words on her tongue and loosen barbs too morbid for polite company. All the little things she’d missed about herself coalesced into something massive and terrifying that had not consumed her, but exposed her. 

It was not the truth of her that shocked the words from her mouth.

No, she knew who she was. She knew **what** she was. She’d accepted it years ago, when she first put peasants to the sword in her hunger for Snow’s head. She would never say it aloud but she was a villain and so very, very good at it. Good at **playing** that Evil Queen.

That was not the problem.

The problem was the woman behind her. The woman who had been dying on the ship deck. Emma had let loose the villain. Broken the shackles around her and unleashed her on Bluebeard. Just by being there…being hurt…dying.

That was all that was needed.

Regina had annihilated a man for nearly killing Emma Swan. And that truth was more painful than any other.

 

####

Regina’s hand was still extended. The curl of her lips was something between a snarl and a smile. Emma could see teeth. See the rise and fall of Regina’s chest. Feel the excitement racing through the other woman.

She could feel the magic fade.

Her mouth was hung open and the air tasted like copper.

“So…Bluebeard…” Hook ventured.

The Evil Queen glanced over her shoulder. “Dead unless some witch of my capabilities collects every particle of him I’ve scattered over the land.” Her quick smile was feral. “And they do it before that immortality spell runs out.”

“That would be impossible,” Mulan said.

“Precisely.”

“He’s dead then,” Aurora determined.

“Quite.”

“You tortured him,” Emma stated. She could still hear his muted scream. See his lips tearing around the thread that kept them closed.

“I did no worse than he did to me.”

“Yeah but he brought you back to life.”

“A mistake I do not plan to make.”

“He was a monster,” Mulan said matter of factly. Like that justified it.

“You put a monster down. You don’t—it was like you were playing with your food.”

Regina shrugged and looked down to inspect her fingers. “I’ll admit to enjoying myself a bit. It’s like stretching ones legs.”

“Again, doesn’t usually involve murder.”

“Emma…” Aurora dared.

But a chastising look from Regina silenced the girl. “You were prepared to kill him just a few hours ago. I did what we both wanted.”

“You’re not supposed to **enjoy** taking a life.”

“I quite like it,” Hook opined.

Of all the—she grimaced, “Can we maybe talk about this somewhere where we **don’t** have an audience of your biggest fans.”

“I’m not a fan,” Aurora was quick to say.

“I only admire her technique,” Mulan quipped.

“I’m with warrior woman,” Hook agreed.

“Great, I’m on a boat full of sociopaths. Where’s Mary Margaret? She’ll agree with me.”

“Resting.”

Okay. That gave Emma pause. Regina was awfully fast with that update, and failing to provide any of the little insults she usually lobbed Mary Margaret’s way. Emma narrowed her eyes.

“Regina…”

“Oh she’s alive,” Regina said testily with a cross of her arms. “I had to heal her mind. So she’s sleeping.”

“If you lobotomized her—“

“I’m not saying it didn’t cross my mind, because the image of Snow in such a state **is** amusing, but healing the mind is delicate, and usually requires a great deal of magical objects that are in short supply on a pirate’s ship. A deep restorative sleep does the same thing. It also takes longer.”

As explanations went Regina’s came across as sincere. Emma still scoffed though. Then she huffed down the stairs to get away from all the crazies and check in on her m—Mary Margaret.

And Mary Margaret was indeed resting. Her eyes were closed and her color had returned. That pained look that had been tattooed on her face last time Emma had looked at her had disappeared.

She took a seat on the mattress next to her and carefully reached out to touch her. She was neither warm with a fever or cool like death. Just. Normal.

“See,” Regina said from the stairs, “Alive and well.”

Emma ignored the pride in Regina’s voice, “How long will she be out?”

“Another hour of sleep. After that she’ll be weak for about a day. So no archery, horseback riding or condescension for at least twenty-four hours.”

Emma rolled her eyes.

“But she will heal.”

“I guess I should thank you.” Regina shrugged coyly. “But after what happened upstairs I’m finding it really frickin’ hard.”

Regina sort of froze. “Excuse me?”

“You used me.”

“To stop a mad man.”

“You **used** me Regina. That’s not going to happen again. **Ever**.”

They glared at one another, Emma on the bed and Regina standing near the door. She braced herself for an argument. Regina would outline all the reasons why she’d sucked the magic out of Emma like she was a battery and then demand Emma agree.

But Regina nodded instead. Accepted what Emma had declared. She turned to start back at the steps, pausing briefly to say, simply, “You were dying. So I did what needed to be done.”

That was it.

She darted quickly back up the stairs, her shoes loud on the wooden steps. The door creaked open and closed again and Emma was once more left alone with a sleeping best friend and her own thoughts.

How could Regina save her life and stop the bad guy and still unsettle Emma so deeply? Why, damn it, was the most unsettling part that justification?

Why would Emma being hurt warrant…the brutality Regina inflicted?

And why…did it feel almost flattering?

 

####

Hook was high up in the ropes, messing about with them and being very nautically inclined. “Lover’s tiff,” he teasingly called down when Regina reappeared above deck.

She waved her arm as she walked beneath him and the ropes came alive, promptly attacking the captain. He grunted and dug his hook into the mast to keep from falling while he used his hand to wrestle the ropes back under control.

“Lovely chat,” he yelled after her.

Mulan and her little princess were up on the bridge, leaning over the side and staring at the two horses sunning on the beach.

“They found you,” Mulan observed.

“They did.”

Aurora asked, “Are they coming with us?”

Us? 

Oh. Of course. They were supposed to be joining them on the trip to Storybrooke. The girl wanted to see her mothers again, and the warrior woman had vowed to protect her. Two more bodies to squeeze through a portal only powerful enough to fit three.

“Yes,” she said with a smile. “I’m rather fond of them. I was thinking I might teach my son to ride on them.” As long as biology didn’t win out and he ended up being as “skilled” on a horse as Emma. She didn’t need her son breaking his neck.

“But we still have my mother to deal with. As long as she has the compass she can find a way to get through.”

Aurora cocked her head to the side, “Can you use a spell to find her?”

“I doubt I need to. She would need a very particular kind of magic to use the wardrobe ashes. There’s a lake between kingdoms. The waters in it have restorative properties. It’s the only place she could hope to accomplish her task.”

Hook landed heavily on the deck behind them and tossed the last few ropes carelessly off his shoulder. “So I suppose we set sail for your lake then? Then to this other land?”

“Yes,” she made certain no trace of her intended deception showed on her face. “Then we all go to Storybrooke.”

 

####

Their lips met in a searing kiss. It curled her toes, electrified her skin. Where hands went fire formed. Gasps and sighs were the music of their affair. Hands in hair. Teeth nipping at flesh. 

But it was more than the physical. What bloomed between them was spiritual.

“Don’t—“ was caught between kiss-bruised lips.

“Please—“ begging from a wicked tongue.

Her hand crept up to lay flat between breasts. And there it was. A locket identical to her own. Seeming to tug her into the morass of that embrace. That relationship. That thing that should be so desperately foreign.

“How…” she whispered between kisses, “how do you have this?”

But her lover would not answer. The kisses shared were apocalyptic. Ending her world and offering nothing in return.

She pulled back. “What is this?” She wrapped her hand around the locket.

Eyes like onyx. Eyes warm as the summer sun. They watched her mournfully. “The future Emma.”

That voice.

Her eyes seemed to open. Knowing filtering into her mind like light slowing rising over the horizon.

“A future destroyed.”

It wasn’t anyone she’d ever kissed before. But the lips were so familiar. As was the skin, cool beneath her fingers. Those eyes.

“For love.”

That voice.

Emma stepped back. The veil fell away.

It was Regina standing before her. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright and achingly desperate.

 

####

Emma popped up off the bed like it was on fire. Partly because she was on—oh god her nipples! She quickly crossed her arms over her chest to hide all the diamond cutting hardness going on and glanced down at Mary Margaret, who was slowly coming to.

That was…did she have a sex dream while taking a nap with her mom?

About **Regina**?

Of all the fucked up and horrible and awful things that had happened since she’d come to the land indoor plumbing forgot that may have taken the cake.

And what the hell was that dream anyways?

Sex dreams weren’t unusual. Hell before she’d known one of them was her dad and it was DISGUSTING she’d had a very pleasant dream involving her, Ruby, David, Graham and a whole mess of bronzing oil.

But Regina? Regina was actually **worse** that David. She hadn’t known she was related to him and he was nice to look at, talk to, and generally share time with. Regina was the spawn of Satan and a big jerk and the worst and damned if she hadn’t looked broken in the dream.

She shuddered again. Like a dead man was walking on her grave or whatever the hell it was. Gross. Repugnant. Disgusting.

Would her nipples EVER return to normal?!

“Emma?”

Thank God for Mary Margaret. Her voice was more effective then a cold shower in Siberia. She groggily sat up in bed holding her head in her hands.

“You look like you went on quite the bender.”

“I don’t really drink,” she said matter of factly, and because **of course** Snow White would be a teetotaler. “What happened?”

“You got knocked out. Regina healed you.”

Mary Margaret’s eyes bulged practically out of her skull, “Regina?!” She quickly started patting herself down.

“Um, what are you doing?”

“Looking for curses or bombs or—”

“Oh come on she’s not that ba—“ Her own feelings on the matter and Mary Margaret’s knowing look stopped her from finishing the sentence. “Okay, but she probably didn’t.”

Another knowing look.

“Seriously. She was too busy saving up all the evil to dismember Bluebeard at a molecular level.”

“What? Bluebeard’s dead?”

She shrugged, “Pretty much.”

Mary Margaret held both of her hands out, as if to keep herself stable. “Is the boat moving?”

Emma tried to concentrate on what it would feel like if that were the case. If she thought about it it **did** feel like they were doing more than rocking in place. “Maybe?”

Mary Margaret pegged her with a very judgey mom look. “You don’t know?”

“We weren’t when I went to sleep!”

“You went to sleep?”

“Well, it has been a long couple of days.” She explained. “And you slept too.”

“Because I had a skull fracture!”

That magic had healed! Emma didn’t actually say that. She was pretty sure it wouldn’t go ever well. Also even as she got more and more inundated with the magic stuff it still felt silly to talk about.

Like “Oh hey Mary Margaret Regina healed your brain with her mind.” How did one actually verbalize the mechanics of that? And if Regina could heal Mary Margaret what else could she do? Could she heal bigger stuff? AIDS? Cancer? Jesus, she could open a clinic at the edge of town and make a flipping **fortune**.

Someone shows up to dissect her? Wave of her hand and more mist people.

Mary Margaret snapped, “Emma,” she said sharply.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she ventured.

Mary Margaret rolled her eyes, immediately winced and then tried to scoot out of the bed. Only pretty slowly because the needing to rest thing Regina had mentioned was very real.

“Why can’t I—“

Emma hopped over to the bed and took Mary Margaret’s arm, slinging it over her shoulder and helping her up gently. “Regina said the healing would take time. You’d need rest.”

“I need a nap to end all naps,” she muttered, “but I’m **not** sleeping as long as Regina and Hook are walking around unguarded.”

Emma carefully supported her and led her up the stairs. They both had to shade their eyes when they came up, the sun was blinding and seemed to be shining directly down the stair and into their faces.

When their eyesight returned to normal Emma **may** have shouted, dropped Mary Margaret and leapt back about a million feet. The giant horse she’d accidentally come face to face with stared calmly.

“Why is there a horse!”

The other one’s head popped up from behind some boxes and stared as well.

“Why are there horses!”

“I wasn’t just going to abandon two perfectly good horses was I,” Regina asked. She came around the boxes, patting the giant one—what she call him—Gauvin? On the neck.

Mary Margaret, having been helped up by Aurora, rubbed at her neck and eyed Regina, “You actually care about the horses?”

“Horses aren’t likely to betray you.”

“Something we can agree on.”

These two were worse than divorcees. “Where the hell are we going?”

“To stop Cora,” Regina said, like of course.

“And that’s…?”

“At a lake with magical properties. Your mother should know it well. It’s where she was married.”

Mary Margaret gasped, “You knew?”

Then Regina honest to god evil villain laughed. “Of course dear. Your little woodland creature friends wouldn’t shut up about it.”

“They would never tell you.”

“Not without duress.”

“You tortured **squirrels**?!”

“No.” The wind against the sails was loud. “Two stags and a rabbit. But it did tenderize the meat quite nicely.”

“Of all the disgusting, amoral—“

“Okay,” Emma said quickly, before the two of them could launch into another fight, “Enough about Regina being so evil she tortured innoncent woodland creatures. Do we actually have a plan when we get to honeymoon lake?”

“Yes,” Regina said, suddenly grim, “Don’t die.”

“I was looking for something a little more thought out.”

“I’m sorry. Dodge the fireballs **and** don’t die. It’s a melee between you idiots, me, and my mother. How complicated could it possibly be on your end?”

“Well excuse me, your majesty. I’m just remembering the big fat failure that’s been every other single plan you’ve come up with.”

“Cora can’t take us all on at once,” Mulan said, finally chiming in. “She fled last time, remember? With my sword and Regina’s magic, and the element of surprise we’ll undoubtedly have it will not be difficult.”

Emma **really** hoped so.

 

####

Regina was faced with a dilemma.

She had to keep her mother out of Storybrooke.

She had to get herself and Emma and Snow **back** to Storybrooke. 

She had to keep Hook and the other two away from the portal.

But without letting Emma or Snow know.

When the three of them made it through it had to look like a fluke. Not like she’d planned it. If they knew she’d planned it she’d then be stuck dealing with those two and their recriminations. And they’d certainly tell Henry too. Then he’d be angry. Emma would be angry. And Regina would be back nearly at square one.

Part one of her plan was simple enough. She suggested they take the ship to Storybrooke to transport the horses.

So Mulan suggested that Aurora stay with the horses and out of harm’s way.

Regina suggested Hook stay as well, so Aurora didn’t steal the ship.

The joke didn’t work. Hook, being the smartest fool among them, declined. “Wouldn’t want you accidentally leaving without me,” he said.

Still. One down.

Two to go.

“How exactly do we steal the compass,” Emma asked. She was offering a hand, helping her mother over a log. Emma’s suggested Snow stay on the ship with Aurora. But thankfully Snow had rejected the suggestion—eyeing Regina and saying she wasn’t taking her eyes off of her.

“You distract her, I get close enough to take it.”

“As long as it’s not difficult,” Snow said sarcastically.

“If **you’d** like to get close to the woman who can rip your heart out, by all means Snow. Do so.”

“I did before. When we fought her up in the Giant’s land.”

“You did,” Mulan asked in surprise.

“And I’m still alive.”

Yes. She was. Questions for another day. “And you also don’t have the compass,” Regina noted.

“Okay you two,” Emma warned, **again**.

“Yes. Please.” That voice— There was a flash of purple smoke and suddenly her mother was standing before them, her held tilted to the side and a wry smile spread across her lips. “No fighting children.”

Regina’s dilemma grew. 

The plan changed. 

 

####

“Mother!”

Regina was frozen to the spot. Emma backed Mary Margaret up so she could lean against a tree and drew her sword. Hook and Mulan did as well.

“What is this dear? Did you bring them to me to kill them?”

“To stop you,” Regina choked out.

This wasn’t…good. Emma could see it in Regina’s body language. That wasn’t a woman prepared to stop Cora by any means necessary. That was a terrified woman. Almost a child.

Cora laughed. It was the joy of a boozey foster mom. The ones that made the system look bad. The ones that treated kids like meal tickets and laughed at the power they wielded and the power the kids were denied.

“Really? All I want to do is be with you dear.”

Emma edged closer to Regina. “How’d you find us?”

“I have my ways,” she supplied coyly.

“Mother,” Regina said, her voice still shaky, “Just give us the compass.”

“No, Regina. Give **me** the shoes.”

Regina grabbed the satchel she wore. “I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. Give them to me. Then you and I will kill these idiots and be on our way. To your home. To Henry.”

Regina. She seemed to waver.

Cora pressed her advantage before Emma could intervene. “Rumpelstiltskin is there too, isn’t here dear? Together we can punish him.”

Regina took a step closer to Emma. “For what?”

“Why for using you my darling.”

“Y—you knew?”

Emma frowned. Knew? Knew what? 

Cora blinked. 

Ha! Whatever the hell they were talking about it had apparently caused the bitch to step in it. Regina was vibrating with anger suddenly. Cora shook her head. “Enough of this Regina.” She held her hand out impatiently, “Give me the shoes and let’s be on our way.”

Oh yeah. Really, really stepped in it. 

Emma felt the tug of magic as Regina drew it towards her. It buffeted Emma, but wasn’t drawn from her—like Regina was half remembering Emma’s statement on the boat. 

The fire flared blindingly in Regina’s hand and then launched across the forest and straight into Cora. The ensuing explosion was catastrophic. Everyone was blown back. Trees shattered. Splinters bit into Emma’s flesh. Her sword was wrenched from her hand and her body slammed painfully against a the thick trunk of a tree. Somewhere behind her she heard Mary Margaret cry out.

When the dust settled only Regina and Cora were still standing. They were untouched. Cora’s hand was extended and flickered with power—from a shield or something. Regina was panting and already drawing another gale of magic.

“Enough,” Cora snapped.

The magic still flickering in her hand suddenly flickered around Regina, binding her. Cora stalked towards her. “I don’t have time for tantrums today. And I will take the—“

An arrow flew out of the tree, stopping centimeters from Cora, caught in her magic. She glared and turned just in time to stop another arrow.

Emma squinted and saw the shadow of Mulan dart through the greenery. Emma took the opportunity to charge Cora. Without a sword she wasn’t really sure what she could do—but Regina had said “distraction” and Emma was certain she was that. 

But Cora waved her hand and Emma flew back again.

“Your friends are irritating,” she told Regina. “Let’s do something about them.”

A short column of purple smoke appeared beside her. When it disappeared a chest lay there: wide open and filled with boxes that glowed red with unnatural light. She waved to the boxes. They all popped open, revealing beating hearts. Groans. Horrible, unsettling, zombie-like groans, emanated from the forest.

Branches cracked as something rushed towards them.

And then. 

The zombies came.

 

####

Damn it.

Rage. Rage and cunning were what always defeated her mother.

And it had to be the most vicious kind of rage.

Behind her Snow was trying to stand and Hook and Mulan and Emma were in a pitched battle with twenty some-odd zombies that had raced across the land at superhuman speeds. Their feet bled from their quick journeys, but the moaning emanating from deep within their chest were from the agony inflicted on them in death. A death that had turned their skin ashey. Rot had set in like oozing sores on the exposed parts of them.

Her mother had killed them once and kept the corpses to use as tools.

Through the thin blue veil of magic holding Regina’s hands at her sides she could see her mother watch the battle with pride.

Rage.

Not awe at her mother’s magic. She needed…

Rage.

Because of Daniel and the old wound of his death.

Rage.

Because her mother married Henry—a man too weak to protect his daughter.

Rage.

For ever slap and terrible word.

Rage.

For what she would do to Henry.

Rage.

For the plans she spoiled now.

Snow White couldn’t die—not today—not after everything Regina had sacrificed to keep her alive. Emma could not die either.

Not the woman who dared to trust.

“It will be out of your hands,” her mother clarified, like teaching a child. “No one in your little town will know what happened here today.”

But Regina would know. She’d know she let Emma Swan die.

Rage.

It bubbled. Boiled. Burned so hot Regina might have cried out. But she gritted her teeth and let it course through her veins. Let it pick and pull at the magic binding her.

Another explosion grew inside of her, and Regina let it come.

 

####

Having avoided ever being caught in a real explosion before Emma was now getting picked up and thrown across the forest in her second one in half an hour. She landed next to Mary Margaret. She was breathing heavily and leaning on a sword covered in the blackened blood of the dead.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Cora?”

Through the smoke they could see the brief flashes of flame as the two sorceresses fought. Each flash illuminating their dark shadows like figures in a Chinese shadow play.

“I think,” she swallowed, “she and Regina are having a moment.”

“Apparently.” 

She couldn’t see Mulan or Hook through all the dust and smoke, just hear their swords clanging and the sick sound of blades being buried in flesh.

There was a loud crack at the center of the maelstrom and Regina came stumbling out of it. She looked around, shading her eyes and squinting to peer through the smoke. When she finally saw them she had to scramble over fallen branches and groaning bodies to reach them.

“Are you all right,” she asked in a rush.

“Yeah, what—“

Regina took Emma’s hand in her own and dragged her away from the battle. “There’s no time. Come on,” she said urgently.

Emma reached back for Mary Margaret and the three rushed through the brush as fast as a weakened Mary Margaret could.

“What’s going on?”

“I think I’ve given us enough time.”

“For what?”

Regina glanced over her shoulder but kept moving, “She plans to kill you both.”

“Yeah we noticed—“

“I can’t let that happen Emma.”

“Wait, what?” She came to a stop, dirt kicking up with the abruptness of it. Mary Margaret sagged against her and panted. Emma tightened her hold but directed her attention to Regina. “What the hell do you mean?”

“I have to get you both out of here. Now.”

“But Mulan. Hook. Aurora’s on the ship.”

“And the portal will stay open as long as I will it. But you two have to go through first. We’ll be right behind you.”

It wasn’t right. “No. No. Regina, we’re not leaving you.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

She’d pulled the silver slippers from her satchel and held them up in her hand. Her eyes glowed purple. A prophetic wind, chilled like it had raced off a snowy bank, blew around them. The shoes disappeared into a bright, sparkly purple dust. It was caught up in the wind, whirled around and around until a funnel was formed.

It tugged suddenly at Mary Margaret and with a cry she was yanked from Emma’s grip and disappeared through the portal.

“Wha—“

The glow faded from Regina’s eyes and she came closer, “You have to go now Emma.”

“No.”

“You two will be safe—“

“And you? You can’t fight your mother alone.”

Regina reached out from Emma’s hand. For once even with the potent magic racing through the other woman it wasn’t cold. “And I can’t fight her while protecting you.”

“I have magic.”

Why…why did Regina then smile like that? Like a mother entertaining a child. “I know.”

“And Mulan’s sword. It can fight magic. And Hook—“

Her words were cut off. Her protests silenced. Regina stepped so close that their bodies touched, from their thighs straight up to their lips. She’d been kissed. She’d kissed. She’d worked her wiles and she’d been seduced. But Regina devoured. Consumed every part of Emma with a caress that seared with something that couldn’t be lust. It was magic. Or some awful other unquantifiable matter. It surged through the kiss. Through Emma. 

And as quick and shattering as it was it ended just as abruptly. “I’ll be right behind you,” Regina said with a voice thickened by…by what had just been stolen and shared and given. Hands pushed Emma away before she could protest.

And other hands grabbed at her. Tugging on her clothes. Her hair. Her everything. The purple funnel of magic whirled around her and the last thing she saw was Regina. Suddenly stalwart. Calm. A titan, it seemed, as Emma shrank away and grew smaller and smaller until she was nothing.

Then she was being caught by Mary Margaret who groaned loudly. “Hold on,” she shouted.

Emma started to flail and her legs struck something solid.

“What—where the hell—!”

“The well,” Mary Margaret said through gritted teeth.

They pushed and pulled and after a great deal of sweat and strain managed to climb their way up and out of the well and into the sweetest smelling air of Emma’s life. 

She’d never known faint whiffs of diesel from the road could smell so wonderful.

They both collapsed and looked up at the sky, blue and perfectly normal. Mary Margaret reached for Emma and they held hands. Peaceful. So peaceful she could almost forget Regina and the kiss and the terror she’d seen just briefly before.

“We…made…it,” Mary Margaret said. “Regina?”

“She said they’d be right behind us. But Cora—”

Mary Margaret closed her eyes, “If Regina said she’d survive fighting her mother, she will.”

Emma laughed. Maybe at that. Maybe at the sound of familiar bugs, and the distant hum of cars on streets.

“What?”

“We’re finally home.”

Mary Margaret laughed too. “Yes. We are.” She squeezed Emma’s hand. “Together.”

For a moment it looked like Mary Margaret might cry, and Emma got that distinct maternal feeling she often did when Mary Margaret looked at her that way. She closed her eyes to shy away from it.

And they both just rested. Wordlessly agreeing to wait.

After what seemed like ages a hand appeared over the edge of the well. Then the top of a head. A bruised and dirty Regina pulled herself up with a grimace.

Emma darted back over to the well and helped her over.

“The others?”

Regina shook her head, “They didn’t make it. My m—Cora stopped them. She was unleashing hell. I couldn’t—“ She closed her eyes in genuine agony.

Mary Margaret sat up, suddenly more awake than she’d been since her injury, “And the compass?”

Regina reached into her satchel and drew it out, “I managed to grab it before I escaped.”

“So…”

“So,” Regina said with a bittersweet smile, “We’re finally home.”

 

####

It wouldn’t be a lie.

Simply an omission of truth.

They would ask about Mulan and the others and Regina would look very sad and tell them they didn’t make it. Everyone would be quiet a moment. There’d be mourning. Then they’d move on.

Maybe it would be so upsetting Emma wouldn’t even ask about the kiss.

The stupid, wretched kiss. An accident. 

Regina had needed to distract Emma and truthfully she had been so caught up in playing the part of a sacrificial hero she’d just leaned in. And Emma had reciprocated.

And it had been—no! It was nothing. It was an accident. It was hormones. Or emotions. Or something more than the promises it had whispered.

“Oh my darling,” her mother said from behind her, “what touching theater.”

She squared her shoulders and turned to face her. “You saw.”

“I did. Did you really send them away to protect them?”

Yes.

“The portal only has enough power for three.”

Her mother smiled knowingly, “And this way when you come through alone they can think tragedy struck your new friends.”

“Right.”

“You could just kill me. The dust from the wardrobe would be enough to get you all through. It would be very triumphant for you.”

She frowned. “I can’t do that Mother.”

“I know.” Her mother smiled. “I heard you Regina. What did you say that day in my tomb? ‘I am your weakness.’ So, dear. Tell me, what is your plan now?”

Regina took a deep breath, “Offer you a trade.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow, her curiosity piqued. “You for this little town you’ve created?”

“No. You let me go and I give you immortality.” She pulled the peach from her satchel. It felt heavy in her hand. As if all the magic and potential of it weighed it down.

“Why would I want that?”

“Because as I am your weakness, power is yours. And **this** is power, Mother. More than you could ever hope to have in Storybrooke.”

“And you. Would I ever see you again?”

“You’d have thousands of years to find a way. Or thousands of years to build an empire that could span across every world.”

“But Storybrooke.”

Regina took a step closer to her mother, the peach still held out as offering. “Storybrooke is cut off from all other worlds. There’s no way to it. But it wouldn’t matter Mother. With your power you could have the whole rest of the universe if you choose.”

Her mother closed the space between them and reached out to stroke Regina’s cheek. She flinched and her mother paused, then proceeded. Her hand was soft. Years as the Queen of Hearts and wife of the fifth prince had smoothed away the callouses formed as a miller’s daughter. 

“But I wouldn’t have you my darling.”

Her mother had always chosen power. **Always**. It was the dragon she chased as Regina chased family. Love. She’d never expected her to say something so bold. To say something so true.

“You are what I want Regina. You and Henry and a kingdom all our own. Where **they** bow to **us**.” Her mother’s eyes were bright with emotion.

Regina closed her own. “But Storybrooke isn’t a kingdom.”

“I know my child.” Something in her voice. She opened her eyes and found her mother suddenly steely-gazed again. “But it will be. **Ours**.”

“No. Mother, I can’t—“

Her words were cut off by the sharp blade that slipped between her ribs. Her legs gave out as her mother pulled the blade from Regina’s side. She caught the peach easily in one hand and gently helped Regina to the ground with the other.

“I know you can’t,” Cora cooed. “Somehow, despite all the odds, you have some sense of foolish honor ingrained in you. Which is why I will go before you my dear. **I** will build our kingdom. And in time. You will find me.”

She couldn’t form the words of a healing spell. Every time she tried to grasp it it turned to mist in her mind. She could only form words of contention. “They’ll stop you. As soon as you appear—“

Her mother put a single finger on Regina’s lips and it alone was enough to silence her. “Oh I know my darling. So,” her voice changed. She changed. “It won’t be me they see.”

It was a mirror looking back at her. Herself, bruised and bloodied and covered in soot and dirt. But with a smile too malicious to be her own.

Her mother, dressed as her, stood. She walked slowly towards the portal home, pocketing the peach and becoming Regina more and more with every step. 

“I will build us Paradise, Regina. And when you find us again, you will want for nothing.”

She tried to reach for her mother with her magic. One last gasp at averting catastrophe.

But it was all too late. Her mother disappeared through the portal.

The world started to disappear too. The creep of unconsciousness clawed at Regina, dragging her down into the abyss. There lay despair. Hopelessness. And the bliss of nothing.

 

**TO BE CONTINUED IN “Toxic is the Unyielding Love.”**


End file.
